Seven
“Those are the roughest holy men I’ve ever seen.” The blue-eyed, pale kid seated across from me stared past me at the far side of the main dining salon of the Human Union Bastogne-class cruiser Emerald River. The twenty Yavi who were seated there wore cleric shawls and bowed their shaved heads in post-meal prayer. But they were the fittest priests anybody had ever seen.
Three days after my conversation with Howard Hibble, Emerald River had slid her ancient, mile-long bulk out Mousetrap’s South Lock. Bound, as scheduled, for Tressel, she carried me, along with an insertion-support team and the rookie case officer with whom Howard had paired me. This lunch was my first meeting with my new junior.
I glanced over my shoulder. “They aren’t preachers, Weddle, if I know my Yavi. And I do. I grew up on Yavet.”
My new partner wrinkled his forehead. “You? You look as Trueborn as I do.”
Actually, nobody looked as white-bread Trueborn as Weddle. Fortunately, the look blended with the Tressens with whom we would be mingling.
“Long, boring story. Weddle, there are two kinds of Yavi. The first kind are the general population. Short, docile, beat down by generations of overcrowding.” I jerked my thumb at the Yavi lunch group. “The second kind of Yavi are those jokers. Military, and cops who act like military. The second kind make sure the first kind stay docile. They make decent soldiers, and excellent bullies.”
The bulk of Emerald River’s cargo consisted of farm implements, electronics, and the latest consumer goods from the Motherworld. Those items would be off-loaded at intermediate planetary waypoints. Once the cruiser reached her turnaround point, which for an embargoed world like Tressel was a geosynchronous parking orbit, she would off-load in orbit her remaining cargo. That consisted of a minimal volume of unembargoed humanitarian items, mostly medical supplies and the freely distributed Trueborn holy books called Gideon Bibles.
Emerald River would also off-load a personnel pod carrying the twenty liars who sat on the other side of the dining salon.
The cargo, human and otherwise, would be shuttled down aboard old-fashioned chemical-fueled space planes operated by neutrals under contract with the Union.
Once on Tressel, the twenty liars would not distribute holy books. They would do what Yavi covert military parties did on every outworld. Build Yavi influence, at the expense of Earth’s influence, by espionage and violence.
Not that Weddle and I were much better. We were supposed to be tourists. He wore a flower-print shirt and kept poking his own cheek with the umbrella garnish that stuck up out of his drink.
Neither we nor the Yavi were fooling the other. The charade had teetered at an uneasy balance point for decades.
Neither the Trueborns nor the Yavi wanted Cold War II to explode into Interstellar War II. The Yavi had the Human Union’s largest population and correspondingly largest gross planetary product. The Trueborns had the smug prestige of being the cradle of mankind. More importantly, the Trueborns controlled the starships that connected the worlds of the Union.
Like any other belligerent couple, each of the two cultures thought it held the moral high ground.
Earth had waged and won the war that eradicated the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony and saved the human race. In the process, Earth had lost sixty million people and had stolen starship technology from the Slugs fair and square.
For its part, Yavet had produced mankind’s most numerically prolific and technically advanced society, albeit one that executed unpermitted babies at birth, raped the environment, and generally made Earth’s last-century Nazis look soft.
The Trueborns refused to share C-drive with Neo-Nazis. The Yavi refused to be judged by holier-than-thou hypocrites. The only thing stupider or worse than the rivalry would have been all-out war. Avoiding which was, therefore, the overriding goal and sworn duty for which every spook case officer would joyfully sacrifice his or her life. And/or the life of his or her partner. It said so right in the oath.
I forked up my last bite of blueberry pie, then glanced at my ’puter. My new junior looked across at me like a puppy.
I slapped my palms on the tablecloth. “Weddle, time to save the universe. Or die trying.”
Part one of universe-saving for a case officer team is insertion prep. Prep was normally conducted on dirt, and took months. Weddle and I were being prepped for this insertion on the fly, in weeks.
Mostly, that didn’t bother me. A kid who grows up denied the right to go to school, which was how I had grown up on Yavet, grows up thirsty for knowledge.
During my two years on Earth I had read everything I could lay hands on. Mostly, a soldier can lay his hands on military history, but I had sponged up other things, too. A playwright named Shakespeare came highly recommended. They said he wrote in the language that became Standard, but at first I barely recognized it. I even read a Gideon Bible once.
I always enjoyed the classroom segments of an insertion prep. Say that for Howard. He had been a professor before the Slug War. So spook branch always force-fed a case officer the natural history of the planet for which he or she was bound, its human history, and a dumbed-down helping of any science the case required.
We got our physical exams updated and a comprehensive prick-and-swallow to immunize us against local diseases.
The physical training and hand-to-hand combat segments of insertion prep were usually just to maintain established fitness and skills. But in my case they were a sweaty and necessary evil. Two years of saloon keeping in the spun-up rotational gravity of a hollow meteor with a mass less than Manhattan Island’s, had been no health-club membership. Weddle kicked my butt daily in all phases.
Running we did by laps around one of the outer decks, like hamsters in a cosmic wheel.
Case officers ran wearing full rucksacks, to simulate field conditions. The only thing more precious to a case officer in the field than his or her partner and weapon was the equipment in his ruck. However, on the last lap packs were dropped for a final sprint.
It was called the burn lap, but not just for what it did to your lungs and thighs. A case officer’s pack was only dropped if the bad guys in hot pursuit got danger-close. And only after yanking a timer cord that caused the pack, and its classified contents, to burn like Krakatoa. And, with luck, take down some bad guys.
Kit and I had ran the burn lap competitively. If I won, we showered ensemble. Sometimes even if I lost. Though then I had to listen to her crow about how second place was just first loser. That was one of her favorite gungho–isms.
But the part of prep I really cared about was the mission-specific case briefing. The CB began after Emerald River made her last jump through the temporal fabric, which left us a week of near-light travel away from Tressel parking orbit.
The first thing that made this particular case briefing abnormal, considering Howard’s security fetish, was that the CB was conducted in the echoing emptiness of Emerald River’s Bay Twenty-four.
Cruisers were originally built as warships. But there were no other ships left in the universe to make war on. Lacking need to project military power, the Trueborns used their cruisers to project mercantile and cultural power across five hundred and twelve planets. All concerned got richer and smarter. However, the Trueborns got richest and smartest.
Emerald River’s belt line was ringed with thirty-six launch and recovery bays that had once housed interceptors and attack transports. In civilian service, most of the bays were empty. But the bays, and the C-drive engineering spaces in the booms behind them, were still sealed off from forward-area passengers, especially curious Yavi “civilians,” by a locked and loaded marine platoon.
The second thing that made this case briefing abnormal was that the King of the Spooks himself had made the trip with us and was briefing us personally.
Howard Hibble’s voice echoed in the hangar-sized, pie-slice–shaped bay, and nobody could hear it except me, Weddle, and the three cleared members of the insertion team.
We sat, hands folded, around a table set up on the deck plates while Howard slid back and forth on his scooter the way a lecturer paced a stage. The only other things in the bay were three sealed plasteel cargo containers. Those were packed with mission-specific equipment. The stuff the spooks thought I needed to know about would be explained to me.
Howard said, “Six months ago we developed intelligence that Yavet and Tressel intended to form a clandestine alliance.”
I raised my eyebrows, but I didn’t ask how we came to know that. Spooks are closemouthed, even among themselves, about “sources and methods.” “Sources and methods” meant how and/or from whom raw information was obtained. “Developed intelligence” was what spooks made of all the information they assembled. It might mean that we had it all on holo. Or it might mean that Howard had a wild-ass hunch.
I furrowed my brow. “Tressen’s a fourth-rate civilization stuck at the end of a jump line. What could be in that for the Yavi?”
Howard pursed his lips. “Well, I have a hunch about that.”
I knew asking what Howard’s hunch was would be as futile as asking about sources and methods. Howard’s hunches had proven world-savingly right often during the last half century. That’s why the tight-ass Trueborn military let him run his branch like a libertarian bus wreck.
Howard made a thin fist. “But we need proof. That’s why we inserted Colonel Born’s team.”
My heart skipped when he mentioned Kit’s name. Howard normally ignored rank and called people by their first names, just one of the anarchic quirks that drove the regular army bughouse. Calling Kit by her rank was, I think, his attempt to depersonalize the situation and keep me focused and quiet. It didn’t work.
I interrupted him. “What happened to her, Howard?”
“We don’t know, Jazen.”
“What feedback have you gotten from the local contacts?”
Howard shook his head. “None. The team went in barefoot. We haven’t had reliable human assets on Tressel for years. Kit freelances and improvises better than anybody I’ve ever seen. Well, almost anybody.”
“Then you want us to follow her?” The only reason I was once again sitting in a starship, surrounded by spooks thinking up ways to endanger me, was Kit.
Howard shook his head. “We don’t know what’s happened to her, but any step we followed when we inserted her team could have been the step that got them in trouble. So we’re changing everything up for you two. Except that once your feet are wet, you’ll be unsupervised, like she was.” He blinked. “Is.”
My breath caught and my heart thumped. She was alive down there somewhere. I had to believe that.
So I nodded at Howard. “Understood.”
Weddle just sat, arms folded and eyes locked on Howard like a good junior. At my first briefing, as a good junior, I had done the same thing. Actually, my eyes had been locked more on my senior than on my briefer.
Really, what I meant by “understood” was that whatever spy foolishness Howard wanted me to pursue, my personal first priority was Kit. The sheer hostility of the planet and society we were going to operate in would isolate me. I would be free to pursue my priority first and Howard’s spy foolishness second. I wasn’t sticking my neck out for some secret handshake. I was sticking my neck out for Kit. So my spy oath was a lie. But lying was what spies did.
“How soon does our Scorpion drop?” I wrinkled my forehead and looked around the empty bay as I said it. It should have occurred to me sooner that the insertion vehicle wasn’t in the bay with us.
Normally, a case-officer team entered an area of operations like any other cruiser passengers, except with phony ID. But in closed and hostile environments like Tressel, insertion was done by ferrying the team down to a planet’s surface at a remote location, unannounced and undetected, in a Scorpion T. Spook Scorpion transport variants were as fast and shifty as Scorpion fighters, but with a radar cross section smaller than the bluebird of happiness and a heat signature fainter than that of day-old pizza.
From orbital strap-in to disembarkation on the ground normally took ten minutes. Things might get hairy later, but insertion by Scorpion had the drama of a limo ride from the airport.
Howard frowned and shook his head. “We inserted Kit’s team by Scorpion. So that’s the first thing we’re changing for you.” He waved at the peephole in the personnel hatch that led into the bay from the passageway. The hatch undogged from the other side, and two more spooks, each wearing coveralls and paratroop jump boots, came in, walked to us, and saluted Howard.
Howard returned the salute with a limp hand.
The redheaded para turned to me and smiled. “Good thing you’re not afraid of heights, Lieutenant.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Huh?”