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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Dyatlov Station

Nova Khahkova Orbit

Timmerman System

Rhodes Sector

Terran Federation

January 3, 2553


Silas watched the maintenance bot scan the cargo container.

Despite the enviro systems, the bowels of Dyatlov Station, orbiting Nova Khahkova, smelled of must and decay from abandoned or sequestered cargo that had been pushed to the cargo bay’s back corner.

The bot in question was running standard safety and serviceability checks on a large container stuffed with cryo-stabilized hemp seeds bound for an agricultural collective farther into the Rhodes Sector. That “standard” had been considerably upgraded after the transplanted chestnut forests of Apalachee III were devastated by blight from an agricultural shipment that hadn’t gone through the proper customs checks. Since then, anything organic transiting through Timmerman had picked up a number of additional inspections.

The cost of which was passed on to the consumers. Naturally.

Silas had been aboard the station for almost thirty-six hours, since shortly after the tramp freighter Reynaldo entered planetary orbit. He hated being out in the open for that long, but his cover as Reynaldo’s assistant purser was solid. And it was what gave him an excuse to be here in this particular cargo bay on this particular day to watch this particular bot carry out its totally uninteresting scan.

He looked around the cargo bay, then glanced at the lower left corner of the holo screen on his left forearm. What looked like a simple projection artifact of amber flickers told him his ECM hadn’t picked up any surveillance, and he tapped a four-digit code.

The bot froze, and he knelt beside it to open its power access hatch. He flexed his forearm, the glow on his screen changed hues, and a brief line of alphanumeric characters appeared on the underside of the hatch: 37/B/NEV.

He looked at it for a moment, then clenched his left fist. His forearm screen emitted a weak laser that erased the words in a puff of smoke, and he stood with a sense of satisfaction. What had looked like normal station scrawl from maintenance workers had actually been a message from his contact. She was waiting for him at their normal spot, no distress.

“As long as a damned Rish doesn’t jump out at me,” he muttered, and shivered at the memory from Port Montclair so many years ago. The trauma of fighting a three-meter matriarch armed with nothing more than a sidearm had plagued his nightmares and given him a permanent aversion to lonely maintenance bays.

He closed the hatch and punched the bot’s power switch. It chirped several times, then floated up into a ceiling docking station, and its report on the container dropped onto his forearm PDA.

Silas pretended to read it as he made for a lift on the far side of the bay. He stepped through its open doors and hit a button for an upper level, but the doors didn’t close immediately. His mouth went dry, and his hand moved to a multitool hanging from his belt. His thumb found the activation button for the vibroblade it concealed as memory replayed the sound of heavy footfalls and the scrape of claws across a deck. He started to press the button, but then the doors finally closed. His tight shoulders relaxed—some—and he shook away the fear and made himself take his hand away from the vibroblade.

As the lift rose, he sent a quick text to Hendrix, his backup, to pass on his next stop and waited until he reached his destination.

The lift opened again onto a promenade that circled the inner edge of the habitat hub. Gravity was light here, and Silas slipped easily into the crowd of spacers on shore leave and longshoremen coming off-shift. This part of the station was normally a nonstop party of working-class men and women, blowing off steam and backpay at the overpriced bars and fast-food stalls scattered across the promenade. The current crowd was more subdued, though. In fact, the pulse of nightclub music was louder than the conversations at the open-air tables and kiosks.

Fear did that to people, Silas mused. The Rhodes Sector was actually closer to the League’s central worlds than New Dublin, and while the war had never directly threatened its star systems—or not in the last forty years, at any rate—the Rhodes Sector was most definitely Fringe space. Its more affluent residents insisted—strenuously—that it was Heart territory; those of lesser means disagreed with them. Based on the casualty totals its people had paid over the decades to support the Heart Worlds’ war, Silas thought they had a point.

He climbed a wire-tread spiral stair to the promenade’s second level and crossed to a rundown storefront. It was an eatery—of sorts—although a holo sign in its less than pristine window advertised lockboxes and lockers, as well. The quick-fried food stand that hadn’t seen a health inspector in years was flanked by crystoplast-faced refrigerated display cases offering bottled beer and other beverages. The crystoplast was no cleaner than the rest of the food stand, and an elderly woman tended a vat of boiling grease behind the counter.

“Pickup for Josh Gray,” Silas said, tapping the side of his hand against the pay plate. The woman looked up from her vat, then dropped a dozen spring rolls into it and wiped her hand on a none-too-clean apron.

“It’s a big one. Go on to the back to get it,” she said, scooping up French fries from a different trough and squeezing out red and white sauces onto them.

“Thanks.”

Silas rested his hand casually on the disguised vibroblade as he stepped around the food stand towards the rear of the establishment. He shouldered through a bead curtain and into a small storage room. The woman seated on a largish crate in one corner came to her feet as soon as she saw him.

“Picking up?”

She reached behind a pile of boxes, and Silas’s lips quirked. He didn’t need to see the weapon hidden behind the pile to know it was there.

She was middle-aged, with a few strands of gray in the dark hair of a mixed heritage that could have blended in on any world from one end of the Federation to the other end of the League. That anonymity was highly useful to someone in her line of work, he thought.

“I need the data wafers heading to Rhodes Prime,” he said.

Her expression eased ever so slightly—only a trained eye could have detected it—at his coded challenge.

“I didn’t think they wanted Quarn dramas,” she replied with the phrase that indicated they weren’t under any surveillance or threat, and Silas nodded and took his hand from the vibroblade.

“Good to see you again, Tara,” he said.

“Sweet merciful Cai Shen, Silas, what the hell’s been going on out there?” She sat back down on the box as an enormous weight seemed to shift off her shoulders. “I’ve never been happier to have a gutter accent. Anyone sounds the slightest bit posh and they get their asses kicked for being a Heart.”

“Seems some things have been boiling over.” Silas leaned against a wall and crossed his arms. “Inevitable, when you think about it. But let’s not waste time. Mama-san runs this spot for us because we don’t draw attention to her, and the longer I’m back here, the more likely it is to raise questions. What news from the Rish?”

“The news is that there’s no news.” Tara tossed her hands up. “The lizards stopped all trade through their outposts as soon as the word about how Murphy trounced the League at Crann Bethadh made its way out here. The Quarn had to dump an entire shipment of live krishal shrimp at customs two days ago because their Rish customer had disappeared, and they’re pissed. So pissed. My source with them didn’t have anything else meaningful to report.”

“So the Rish are buttoning up. Mmm…”

Silas’s jaw worked from side to side while he pondered that. The inability to glean any information on the Rishathan Sphere made his job as an intelligence collector difficult. But every action an enemy took betrayed him in one way or another, if one only knew how to read behind it, and…

“Why?” he asked after a moment. Tara cocked her head, and he shrugged. “Why are they buttoning up? How did they justify it?”

“They didn’t. No reason given. Which upset the Quarn even more. You know what sticklers they are for contracts. But it’s not bloody likely the timing of Murphy’s mutiny and the Rish going dark is a coincidence.” She shrugged. “Rumble from the common folk—” she pointed her chin at the door “—is that they’re worried about the conflict spilling over, so they’re cutting trade so they don’t look like they’re playing favorites to anyone. Lying bastards. Is it true about what Murphy found? Some hidden League shipyard built by the Rish?”

“Not exactly, but close.” Silas drew a small data wafer from a breast pocket. “Here’s the truth, straight from Murphy and O’Hanraghty. Raw feed from his ships at the Battle of Crann Bethadh and his raid on Diyu.”

“Diyu?”

“What the Leaguies called their shipyard.” It was Silas’s turn to shrug. “It’s in the astro catalogs as Yuxi.”

“So we finally got the smoking gun against the Rish? We can prove they’ve been—”

“Close enough to it for anyone with functioning brain cells.” Silas handed the wafer to her. “But our directives have changed since Murphy got back from League space.”

“What?” She frowned. “Why?”

“Because the Hearts sent a batch of federal marshals and a backup of Army Hoplons to arrest Murphy on some trumped-up bullshit charges. They really wanted his ass for defying orders and defending new Dublin, of course, and Crann Bethadh wasn’t having it.

“Murphy tried to keep it under control. Had his own Hoplons there for cover. Even offered to return to Sol voluntarily, aboard his own flagship. But the frigging idiot they’d sent to manage their clusterfuck wasn’t having it. He actually started shooting…and managed to murder the planetary president in front of four hundred or so witnesses.”

Tara’s eyes had grown steadily larger as she listened to him. Now they flared wide in mingled shock and disbelief.

“That was the final fucking straw,” Silas told her grimly. “Most of the marshals and Army bastards were killed on the spot, the planet went ‘out of compliance,’ the system government tried and hanged the idiot Hearts who didn’t manage to get killed in the initial fighting…and the whole damned Concordia Sector’s decided to follow New Dublin’s lead.”

“What?!?” She stared at him, and he grimaced.

“Yep. They’re calling themselves the ‘Free Worlds Alliance.’ And unless I miss my guess, their ‘Alliance’ is going to spread clear across the Fringe, at least the Southern Lobe, as soon as word gets out.” He smiled thinly. “I’m betting you can at least guess how completely into the crapper that’s likely to throw all our plans. Mind you, it’s not necessarily a bad thing from our perspective, but it does mean we need to do some…rethinking.”

“Holy shit.” Tara rolled her eyes. “Still have a gift for understatement, I see! I didn’t know about Concordia, but I do know the Rhodes Sector’s about to blow up, Silas. My Quarn contact asked me how he can reengineer starfish weapons for human hands.” She snorted. “They can always smell new market opportunities, can’t they? What worries me is that they’re probably right about that one.”

“I know. That’s where you come in.” Silas turned to gently open a peephole in the beaded curtain behind him. “I need you to get all this information on the gray net,” he said, gazing through the opening. “Upload it to every Alliance-friendly space you can find. Get it close to mainstream media, and it’ll bleed over. The more the Heart tries to suppress it, the more people will believe it.”

Tara regarded the data wafer dubiously, then slipped it into her bra.

“I thought we were doing this to expose the Rish,” she said.

“We were. We succeeded. And now there’s a new problem for the Federation. Murphy’s on the side of the light, Tara. He’s not leading the revolt for his own sake. He’s trying to preserve the Federation and end the war with the League.”

“And how’s he doing that by killing Hearts?” Tara demanded skeptically. “I’m not that fond of federal marshals, but hanging them?”

“They shot first. And New Dublin hanged them for murdering its president; he just didn’t stop it. The thing is, this either ends quickly, with Murphy negotiating with the Heart from a position of strength, so we can keep the Federation together, or the Federation shatters when the Five Hundred and their thugs try to force their Fringe wage slaves back onto the plantation. We help Murphy, and it’s less dying. Less suffering. And what do you think the Rish will do if there’s no Federation anymore? Dozens of sectors and stars fending for themsel—”

“I’m sold,” Tara interrupted. “I’m sold! I never cared for the Hearts anyway. I could have been raised by my father, but he went Preferences instead of Needs and got called back up when I was a baby. He never came home.”

“Spoken like a true Fringer.” Silas gave her a slap on the shoulder. “When can you get that data out?”

“Today, if need be. I’ve got sources and embeds all through Nova Khahkova and prospects on ships embarking for Rhodes Prime and out to Zolist by the next night-cycle. Where are you heading next?”

Silas canted his head at her, and she grimaced.

“Shit. Sorry I asked. I don’t know, I can’t spill. I got it.” She rolled her eyes. “So, that question not asked, what next from my end?”

“There’s contact codes on the wafer to link up with Alliance forces if or when they arrive here. Do what you can to support the people when they decide it’s time to rebel. Agitate. Rabble-rouse. Make life hell for the Five Hundred here, and Murphy’s job will be that much easier.”

“I’m no terrorist, Silas.” Tara looked away.

“No, and that’s what the newsies will call us, however careful we are,” he agreed. “But it’s coming anyway, and somebody needs to steer—if we can—to keep it from all going straight to hell. Keep the violence away from the civilians as best you can. There’s going to be plenty of people who want plain old revenge killings, and we need to step on that as hard as we can. Butler screwed up there. Gobelins was practically begging for the Army to come in and restore order. They got more than they bargained for when that monster Alaimo showed up.”

“What’ll it be like with Murphy in charge?” she asked.

“All I can say is he’s a good man. When the Hearts gave him power, he used it to save lives. Not everyone passes that test. Hell, for that matter most of the real Hearts could give less than a rat’s ass about Fringe lives. He does.”

He shrugged, and after a moment, Tara nodded.

“Don’t follow me right away,” he said. “Don’t go through the promenade. Get that information out, but do it safely.”

“Come on, Silas. I know no one’s coming to my rescue if I screw up. That’s one of the first things you taught me. Godspeed.”

She waggled her fingers at him.

“I’ll leave a little extra to Cai Shen for you,” Silas said, and ducked through the beads. He set a large-denomination credit chip on the cooktop for the woman running the stall and it vanished into her apron as soon he stepped outside.

As he walked away from the storefront, Silas texted Hendrix to warn him he was on his way to their shuttle and telling him to ready it to unmoor from the station and alert the Reynaldo’s skipper to clear their departure from the system.

He walked through a throng of people who stood up at a news crawl across the bottom of one of the central holo displays. He heard a lot of grumbles about the news that Vice Admiral Thakore had been dispatched to crush Murphy’s revolt. Of course, given the timing on Thakore’s departure, if there’d been a fight at Jalal Station, it was already over. The news just hadn’t reached the Rhodes Sector yet. When it did—

A flash of golden light caught his eye, and he turned to look at the source. An elderly man in a suit that was too nice for this part of the promenade raised a glass at him from a small table outside a bar. Then the old man slipped a laser pointer into his cuff and sat patiently.

Silas slowed to a stop. He hadn’t encountered that bit of field craft in many years, an iris light tuned to the individual rods and cones of a single person’s eye. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and he felt the station close in around him as he realized the man who’d taught him that signal was at the bar. He swallowed hard and rubbed his wrist, and his thumbnail tripped a switch built into the side of his forearm PDA and sent an alert to Hendrix that something was about to go very, very wrong. Then he turned sharply and went up a short staircase. A barfly with too much makeup and not enough clothing sauntered over to him.

“I’m thirsty. You buying?” she asked.

“Let me eat first.”

He winked at her and went to sit down across from the well-dressed man. A trio of empty glasses clustered together on one side of the table.

“Silas.” The man waggled a fourth, nearly empty, beer glass at him. “I’m glad you finally showed up. The girls keep calling me a ‘Cheap Charlie,’ but I tip the bartender a bit extra.”

“Robinson…You retired.”

Silas sat close to the edge of his chair and his eyes darted around the bar, trying to identify who was paying too much attention to them.

“I did!” Robinson worked a sip from one side of his mouth to the other. “This is watered down. I expected that, but this is almost egregious. And you’re right. I did retire, so you should appreciate how much of an inconvenience this is for me. One day I’m fly-fishing on my land in Montana, and the next I’m reactivated. Seems retirement isn’t the end of one’s service to the Federation.”

“I don’t think you’re here to defect,” Silas said, looking thoughtfully at a man with wide shoulders and a too-new shipsuit a dozen yards away, taking his time deciding which Quarn silk scarf he was going to buy.

“Certainly not.” Robinson set his glass down and pushed it aside. “You had so much promise, Silas. Then you went down the Rishathan conspiracy rabbit hole…Look where you are now.”

“I was right,” Silas huffed. “The only people who still think it’s conspiracy paranoia have their heads buried in the sand.”

A small drone zipped overhead, and Silas rested one hand on the disguised vibroblade.

“I’m not here to kill you, my boy,” Robinson said. “Professional courtesy and all that. It was my one demand before I came out of retirement.”

“How’d you find me?”

“Tsk-tsk-tsk.” Robinson wagged a finger at him. “I taught you a lot. I didn’t teach you everything. And if I do tell you—”

“I have to assume you’re lying. And when I try to figure out where my seals went bad this time, it’ll just open me up to your next surveillance target.”

The scarf-examiner turned away from the display and Silas tensed slightly.

“Again, I’m not here to kill you.” Robinson ran a fingertip around the rim of his glass. “I’m here to talk, on behalf of the Five Hundred and the loyal intelligence community. You’re our best direct line back to Murphy that isn’t a missile.”

Silas laid his hands on the edge of the table.

“Do you remember what I taught you about those in power?” Robinson asked “Back when you were embedded in that pirate clan past the Blue Line?”

“‘To lose power is to die.’” Silas nodded. “Then you rambled on about class struggle and long-dead ideologies.”

“You don’t think there’s a class struggle now? The Fringe is breaking from the Heart. Six decades of war, and it was some nowhere colony eating a K-strike that finally broke the camel’s back.” Robinson shook his head. “Took everyone back home by surprise, actually.”

“It was the Heart abandoning people on Inverness to be murdered by the League that did it,” Silas said. “Then they wanted Murphy to do the same thing in Crann Bethadh. Enough was finally enough. All it took was a little unvarnished truth. But, much as I enjoy the chance to catch up…what’s your message to Murphy?”

“Ship waiting for you?” Robinson smiled and raised his drink to his mouth. “All right. We’ll let Murphy live. He gets an FTLC with its parasites crewed by all the seditious scum he can carry and takes himself out beyond the Blue Line. We won’t come for him. And when he sends for his family on Earth…they’ll come to him. Unharmed.”

“Rather generous of the Five Hundred.” Silas caught the bartender staring at them. The man reached under the bar and moved something into easy reach. “What about the Alliance and all the Fringers with them?”

“Do you really think the Five Hundred will give them up?” Robinson chuckled. “Tell Murphy to set up his own little rabble paradise beyond the Blue Line. Give the Fringe someplace to run to.”

“And then a fleet will show up on his doorstep and apply Standing Order Fifteen. The Alliance may be made up of Fringers, but they’re not stupid.”

“I’ve been told that won’t happen.” Robinson sipped.

“And if Murphy refuses?”

“Kanada Thakore can’t protect Simron or Vyom or the girl…”

“Reagan.” Silas’s face went hard. “They’re not involved. They’re civilians. Children!” he hissed.

“I never threatened them,” Robinson said mildly. “On the other hand, sometimes bad things happen even to good people.”

He set his glass aside.

“We’re in uncharted territory here, Silas. The League has never had—and will never have—the strength to threaten the Heart Worlds. Xing? Even if she’d had every ship Murphy allegedly destroyed at Crann Bethadh—or in the shipyards he supposedly took out—she’d never have reached Earth or the worlds that really matter. The Five Hundred were spooked by her, but they’re terrified of Murphy, son. He’s done more damage to their control than all those years of war with the League combined.”

“The Five Hundred did this to themselves,” Silas shot back. “They can’t demand generations of blood from people and get rich off their sacrifices forever. Sooner or later the wheels come off. The Alliance is the monster they made.”

“I’m aware.” Robinson nodded. “Some old hands saw this coming years ago…but hindsight isn’t all that useful in the midst of a crisis. I’m no part of the Five Hundred Silas. I’m a useful tool of theirs that earned the right to die comfortably out in a pasture. But I know the Five Hundred, and they aren’t going to let the Fringe go, son. They’ll scorch every last world from New Dublin to the League if they have to. Murphy can’t win this.”

“He’s proven he can beat the odds,” Silas replied. “This won’t be like Gobelins where the Army and the Five Hundred managed to cover up what they did. If the Five Hundred act like tyrants, the entire Federation will see it.”

“And you think that will matter to the Five Hundred? The Federation is their fiefdom, Silas. They play their games amongst each other, and we’re the pawns. They’ll upend the table before they lose the game.”

“I’ll pass that on to Murphy.” Silas hooked a thumb under his forearm PDA and depressed a small trigger as he removed a magnetic button. He set the button down in the middle of the table.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

Robinson raised an eyebrow and shook his head.

“It’s Quarn tech. Amazing what you can pick up if you know the right people. I send the activation code, and a cloud of gomi poison will annihilate everyone on this promenade in minutes. The Five Hundred don’t care about your life. Or mine. Or anyone else’s out here. But you do care about yours, don’t you, Robinson?”

Robinson stared at the button.

“My first great-grandchild will be born in a month,” he said.

“Then when I walk away from here, I’d better be able to keep walking. There’s a motion sensor and a rangefinder in the base. It’s keyed onto you. You move the button? Poof of gas. You get up and try to walk away? Poof of gas. Either way, you die. And a lot of other people, too. Including your backup looking at the scarves, the bartender, and the spotters milling around the holo show.”

“Are those the only ones you’ve picked out?” Robinson half smiled at him.

Gomi will get them all. I’ll send the self-destruct codes soon as I’m clear. Don’t go anywhere.”

Silas stood.

“Silas! I wish it didn’t have to be this way. You were always my favorite,” Robinson said.

“And you were my best teacher,” Silas said. Then he squeezed his forearm PDA and raised it to his lips.

“Drop it,” he said. “Drop it all, now!”

His partner, Hendrix, touched the macro tapped into the station’s control grid.

Power cut out across the promenade. Yells and shouts rose as opportunists swiped merchandise and the already paranoid crowd panicked. Silas shoved his way through a knot of spacers and vanished behind a massage parlor. He stabbed a small screwdriver into the frozen handle of a maintenance hatch, and the tiny battery in its handle powered the lock long enough for him to open the hatch and slip away into the pitch-dark passage.

* * *

An hour after the chaos began, Robinson still sat waiting at the table while the station’s bomb squad examined the tiny button in full gear. They took their time. But, finally, a technician—who looked more like a bear than a man in his protective suit—twisted off his helmet.

“There’s nothing in it,” he said. “It’s a lump of plastic.”

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Robinson grimaced as he shoved up out of his chair and waddled toward the back of the bar. “Where’s the pisser?!”

“Not here!” The bartender waved his arms. “You go next-door!”

Robinson stopped, slapped a palm against the back of the bar, and bent forward slightly at the waist.

“Too late,” he grumbled and unzipped his pants.

“Five different ships have shoved off since the power outage,” a voice said in Robinson’s ear. “Port Authority can still stop and board two of them before they’re out of range. Which—”

“Don’t bother,” Robinson snapped as he relieved himself. “I want him to get away and send a message to Murphy. That’s the plan.”

“Then why’d he cause all this trouble?”

“Professional courtesy…And it was his own way of telling me I’m too old for this shit.”



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