by Marko Kloos
“Shipmates,” Aden said. “We work together. We were taking a break planetside.”
There were no chairs in the room to offer the constable other than the upright medical cradle, so Aden walked over to the window and indicated the space next to him with his palm turned upward, the Oceanian gesture of polite acquiescence. The view from the window was a corner of Adrasteia’s busy inner harbor near the central island. Usually, the sight of the blue skies and calm seas had a pacifying effect on him, but right now he was too mindful of his circumstances to relax. He had to give enough information to the constable to evade suspicion, and not enough to raise questions, all while keeping his accent and mannerisms carefully controlled.
“I’m very sorry about your shipmate,” Constable Holst said. “Master Dorn. We’ll do all we can to find the man who is responsible for all that violence.”
“I’ll help you in whatever way I can,” Aden said. “But I don’t know how much good I’ll be to you right now. I’ve been in stasis for the last three days. My brain still feels like mush.”
“I completely understand. You want to tell me what happened in broad strokes? It’s fine if there are some things you can’t quite remember yet.”
“We were planning to get together. The crew, I mean. It’s a bit of a ritual when we’re onshore. When Tess and I got there, we found Tristan dead in his bed with a wound in his chest. When we tried to summon help, we got ambushed by the man who did it. Everything after that is still kind of a blur. We fought, he stabbed us both, and then I managed to hurl myself off the balcony and into the water with him.”
“You’re certain the man who attacked you also killed your friend.”
“He told us so,” Aden said.
“And you know who he is?” Constable Holst asked.
Aden shook his head. “He calls himself Milo. But I’ll swallow a liter of stasis fluid if that’s his real name. He’s an enforcer for the people we pissed off a few weeks ago.”
“Tell me about that.”
Aden considered his reply. Holst had almost certainly asked his crewmates already to get all the versions of the story, but he was reasonably sure that Decker and the others would have kept the nature of their contraband cargo a little vague. If they had told Holst about the nuke and Aden didn’t mention it, he’d make himself suspicious with his evasiveness, but if they hadn’t and he volunteered that information, it would turn a routine police investigation into a major news item on the networks in a few hours.
“We took on a cargo contract and defaulted on the delivery. After the supplier dropped the cargo with us, we had a strong hunch that it was illicit. So our engineer opened it. Then we contacted the nearest Alliance patrol and turned it over to them. RNS Minotaur, if I can remember correctly.”
“Can you tell me what it was?”
“Military-grade weapon components,” Aden replied. And that’s the understatement of the millennium.
Constable Holst nodded. He didn’t seem surprised, which confirmed to Aden that he had heard some variation of this information already.
“We refunded the advance fee to the client. But they didn’t take it well.”
“It certainly looks like they did not,” Holst said. “I know it’s probably a small consolation after what happened, but your crew did the right thing.”
“It is a small consolation,” Aden confirmed. “Tristan’s dead because we made a bad call before we made a good one. But thank you.”
“I know it’s hard to think straight when someone is trying to stick a knife into you. But is there anything distinctive about this Milo you remember? Something that may help us track him down?”
“He’s not from Oceana. I’m pretty sure he’s Gretian.”
“What makes you think that?”
“His accent,” Aden said. “He doesn’t really have one. But I have a Gretian mother. Something about the way he talked sounded familiar, so I started talking to him in Gretian to distract him.”
“You speak Gretian, huh?” Holst said.
“Enough to know that he’s a native speaker. He’s fluent enough in our language, but he doesn’t sound like he’s from anywhere.”
“Interesting. I’ll pass that on. Anything else you can remember?”
Aden exhaled and shook his head.
“Nothing that comes to mind right now. He showed up, we talked, we fought, and then we were in the water. It all happened in a rush. And my adrenaline was through the roof.”
“That is perfectly fine.” Constable Holst pocketed the comtab he had been holding and flashed a curt smile. “I know there’s a lot weighing on your mind right now, and you are still not fully recovered from your injuries and the treatment. But I would appreciate it if you could find the time to come see me at the justice center in a few days for a victim statement. After you’ve had time to clear your head.”
It was a politely worded request, but something about the way it was delivered gave Aden the distinct feeling that his appearance was not optional, that Holst wouldn’t just leave things alone if he failed to show. If Holst thought there was more to the story than what the crew had told him, he’d start digging deeper, and Aden knew that his fake ID pass would not withstand that kind of scrutiny. If he was lucky, they’d merely put him on a transport to Gretia instead of shipping him back to the Rhodians to serve a few more years for his POW parole violation.
“Of course,” he said. “After I help bury my friend, if you don’t mind.”
“Absolutely,” Holst said. “No rush at all. I will send the information to your comtab. Early next week should be more than fine if it’s convenient. Contact me if you recall anything important before then.”
“You can be sure of it,” Aden replied.
“Good day, Master Jansen. And again, sorry for your loss and all you went through. We will make sure the man who did this ends up where he belongs.”
Aden nodded and watched Constable Holst depart. When the automatic door closed behind the police officer, the room was so quiet that he heard his own heartbeat in his ears, beating a little faster than normal.
“Well, shit,” he said into the silence.
CHAPTER 10
IDINA
Inside the stricken Badger, the fire suppressant system went off again near the front of the vehicle with a sharp hiss.
“Sound off,” Idina yelled. “Everyone okay?”
Her half section returned their affirmations one by one. In front of her, the deputy commissioner looked shaken but unhurt.
“Something went through the hull bottom in front,” the Badger commander sent from his seat behind the forward bulkhead door. “Drive train’s fried. We’ve lost a wheel or two. Running on the backup power pack.”
“What did we hit? Explosives?” the deputy high commissioner asked. His voice sounded a quarter octave higher than before.
“Doubt it,” Color Sergeant Sirhan said. “There was no bang.”
“Whatever it was, it went through our armor somewhere,” Idina said.
Sirhan nodded and tapped the controls on his comms cuff.
“Ops, this is Kukri One Niner. We’ve had hostile interface on the southbound lane of the bridge at Delta One Two. No injuries, but our ride is a mission kill. Request extraction and recovery team.”
Idina scanned the feed from the overhead drone that was now circling their location. The Badger was nosed up against the low barrier dividing the transit lanes in the middle of the bridge. It sat almost perpendicular to the flow of traffic and blocked most of the roadway. There was smoke and fire suppressant pouring out of a spot in the right front of the hull. Twenty or thirty meters behind the wrecked Badger, she saw a hole in the road surface that was still smoking with the residue of whatever propellant the unknown device had burned.
“No contact,” she said to Sirhan. “Traffic’s stopped behind us. Nobody’s shooting.”
She turned to her troops in the hold next to her.
“Purple Section, disembark and secure the sit
e. Don’t let any civilians close to the armor. But keep your trigger fingers in check. Nobody shoots without clearance.”
They unbuckled their harnesses and readied their weapons. When the tail ramp started lowering, Idina had an unwelcome premonition of gunfire ripping through the opening hatch and tearing them all to shreds before they had a chance to leave the Badger. But the ramp hit the green-colored roadway without incident. She was closest to the opening, so she rushed out and took up position to the left of the ramp to secure the egress of the rest of her small team. There was no obvious threat waiting, no insurgents in stealth suits advancing on them, no bullets bouncing off the armor of the Badger. It was a sunny, peaceful-looking day outside. They were stopped right in the center of the bridge span, dozens of meters above the river. Behind the Badger, the civilian pod traffic kept rolling up the bridge and slowly closing the gap the AI had made earlier.
Idina connected to the traffic network and overrode the bridge traffic controller manually with the military access code. The roadway underneath her boot soles changed from green to red, and the traffic stopped again. Her quick count showed at least a dozen transport pods on the bridge behind them, the closest one only fifty meters to the rear of the smoking Badger. In the Alon bubble of the passenger compartment, the occupant looked at her with anxiety on his face. She held out her hand, palm forward, in the universal “stop” gesture and shook her head at the passenger. Around her, the section had taken up their security positions, covering the Badger from all four corners. Idina walked toward the hole in the roadway that had blown open underneath their vehicle and carefully stepped close to it. It was a small hole for the outsized damage the vehicle had suffered, no more than the diameter of a dinner plate.
“Careful, Colors,” Private Condry said from his corner of the Badger. “Could be a follow-up charge nearby.”
She turned around and nodded her acknowledgment. Nearby, the Badger sat at a slight list. The front road wheel on the right side had been blown off the vehicle, and she didn’t see it on the roadway anywhere, so she surmised it had been flung across the traffic lanes and over the edge of the bridge into the river. The second wheel stuck out of the wheel well at an angle, obviously wrenched from its mountings by the blast. Whatever had exploded underneath the Badger had ripped off the wheel, demolished the drive train, and almost flipped the thirty-ton vehicle onto its side. She turned back and gave the hole another look. The edges were blown out and looked melted. When she stood right in front of the opening, she could see that the explosive had punched cleanly through the entire upper layer of the bridge, fifty centimeters of steel, laminate, and solar cells.
“What have we here?” Idina murmured to herself.
She took a knee and touched the edges of the hole lightly with her glove. It was a familiar-looking penetration pattern, even if she usually got to see the entry instead of the exit.
“What do you see, Chaudhary?” Colors Sirhan asked over the comms.
“They used an anti-armor round,” she said. “Explosively formed projectile warhead, large caliber. Maybe from a naval gun. Mounted upward under the road surface. Clever little shits.”
She stood up and looked around again.
“Took away half the explosive power when it had to punch through that road top. But that way it was shielded from the drone sensors.”
She walked back toward the Badger, suddenly feeling like there were hundreds of pairs of eyes on her.
“Section, stay on your toes. They had to blow it remotely. Means they’re still out there. Maybe watching us right now.”
The bridge was in the middle of an open area with long lines of sight. The nearest building was a residential cluster on the left bank of the river just as it made a turn. Half of the windows and terraces in that cluster were high enough to see the top of the bridge and the vehicles on it. She bounced a laser off the nearest windows: 475 meters. The little machine pistol she had in her hands was good for half that distance at best. At least a dozen terrace doors stood open in the pleasant late-summer weather, a dozen different vectors for eyeballs and gun barrels.
“How long for the QRF bird?” she asked Sirhan.
“ETA six minutes.”
“Keep the VIP in the armor until then. We’re too exposed up here to cover every angle.”
“You got it. Stay close, don’t take chances,” Sirhan replied.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Idina said. She looked back at the access ramp on the left bank, clogged up with civilian transport pods in orderly intervals. The right bank, their destination, was almost free of traffic now, but the Badger wasn’t going anywhere, and the end of the ramp was over a hundred meters away, with no obvious cover beyond for another sixty or seventy.
“Colors, look,” one of her troopers said and pointed behind her. She turned to see that one of the civilian pods was slowly rolling onto the red section of the bridge. The bridge AI had stopped all automatic traffic, which meant that the passenger had overridden his vehicle’s AI and taken manual emergency control. The pod passed the row of standing traffic at walking speed on the inside of the travel lane.
You’re either profoundly stupid, or you’re about to make an explosives delivery, Idina thought. She disengaged the safety on her gun and walked toward the oncoming pod.
“Hold your fire,” she sent to her section.
She waved at the oncoming driver with both hands, crossing them in front of her face emphatically.
“Stay back,” she yelled. “Do not approach.” Her helmet’s AI translated her commands into Gretian and amplified them. But the driver either couldn’t hear her, or he wasn’t in the mood to listen, because his pod continued its slow drive up the ramp and past the waiting traffic.
“What in the hells is wrong with you?” she muttered. When the pod was past the front of the queue and still moving toward the Badger at slow speed, Idina raised her weapon and aimed it at the sensor lens at the front of the vehicle. She had taken up most of the slack on the trigger of her machine pistol when the pod finally came to a halt, less than thirty meters in front of her. She released the pressure on the weapon’s trigger.
The pod’s access door swung upward and back, and a Gretian man climbed out. He straightened up and walked toward Idina with unconcealed irritation on his face, oblivious or unconcerned that she was aiming a gun in his general direction.
“Stop!” she shouted. “Do not come closer. This is an Alliance military emergency.”
He kept walking as she reeled off her canned warnings, and she finally raised her weapon and aimed the targeting laser at the middle of his chest.
“Is my translator software broken? Stop, or I will shoot you.”
He looked down at the green chevron on his chest. Three more appeared one by one until his tunic looked like a novelty fashion item for safe nighttime exercise. The civilian looked past Idina, and the realization that he had several automatic weapons aimed at his vital organs finally seemed to sink in. He halted his advance and glared at Idina.
“You cannot just shut down the bridge!” he shouted at her. “There are people with a purpose here. People who have to be on the other side.”
“Someone set off an explosive charge. Our vehicle is disabled. The Gretian authorities will direct you once they arrive.”
“There is plenty of space to the side!” he said.
Idina shook her head in disbelief.
“No one gets to come within thirty meters of that vehicle. You may work out your transportation problem with the police when they get here. Now please return to your pod and do not come any closer to us with it.”
That did not seem to mollify the civilian. He was a ruddy-faced man in his middle years, wearing business clothing, and clearly used to getting his way most of the time. Idina could tell that without the guns pointed at him, he’d walk right toward her and try to shove her out of the way, an approach that a few Gretians had tried on her in the past to amusing effect. Realizing that he had limited options for
defiance displays, he kicked the road surface and threw his hands up in exasperation. The passengers in the pods behind him were watching the show with apprehension, undoubtedly cognizant of the fact that they were in the line of fire if their fellow citizen decided to do something stupid.
If only Captain Dahl were here, she thought. She’d have him shut up and back in that pod faster than I can put my weapon on safe.
“You people have been here long enough,” he said. “This is ours, not yours. Our roads. Our bridges. Paid for by our public funds. You cannot just act like you own the planet now. Go home. Leave us be.”
Idina found that her shallow well of patience had run dry somewhere in the middle of his little speech. There was a place and a time for occupation disputes with civilians, but the center of a bridge right after an insurgent trap was not it. But before she could voice that thought and order Privates Arjun and Raya to help the man back into his conveyance, there was a dull crack overhead. She looked up to see the surveillance drone falling from the sky, trailing debris and smoke as it plummeted toward the ground.
“What in all the hells . . .” she said. In front of her, the Gretian civilian followed her gaze and looked at the falling drone, dumbfounded. Then the significance of the event burned through the surprise that had slowed down her brain momentarily, and the jolt of adrenaline she felt made the top of her head feel like it was about to blow off.
“Section, take cover,” she shouted. “The ambush is still in progress.”
Behind the angry Gretian civilian, his pod took a hammer blow from something unseen that rocked it sideways and sprayed a cloud of composite and Alon shards in every direction. The civilian staggered and fell to the ground face-first. Idina felt bits of debris shrapnel tearing into the cloth layer above her spidersilk armor and turned away from the blast. When she looked back, the civilian was still on the ground, motionless.
“Incoming fire, direction unknown. Get me a fix on that firing position if he shoots again.”
