Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle Read online

  She left the office and went back to check progress only to find her computer had finished crunching the data. She looked it over but found nothing to change her mind. She was packing up and moving out.

  It took a lot less time to withdraw all her gear and pack it back aboard the APC than it had to unload and set it up. Maybe two hours later she was driving again, heading back to the shuttle. She hadn’t reached the halfway point when Eric contacted her.

  “Alpha-Two, Alpha-One you read?” Eric said.

  “Alpha-One, Two copies. How’s it going in sunny Haverington?”

  Eric snorted. “I found it.”

  Gina’s jaw dropped. “You found it? In Haverington?” she couldn’t believe it. Her information pointed away from the capital altogether and toward a more historic site. “You sure?”

  Eric sounded puzzled when he said, “You doubted your research? The library was right where you said it would be. Intact too. The place looked untouched by time, Gina. Incredible really. I think we should empty the racks and take the crystals home with us. I know Kushiel is a monument, but all those books should be used not left here.”

  Gina blinked. “Wait what?”

  “The books. They’re wasted here. I don’t think Snakeholme’s library is even half the size of this one.”

  She finally caught on. “You mean you found the library, not the A.I?”

  “Didn’t I just say I found the library? Maybe you need to run a diagnostic. You don’t sound like you’re tracking right. Check your O2 levels.”

  Gina grinned. He would be checking his when he heard what she’d found. “Eric, I found it. The prize is mine.”

  “Bull.”

  “Nope, not kidding. I powered up the node and it was right there in the buffer. Stripped the header info on a bunch of files and found the originator. Sebastian was up and running when the power went out.”

  “Bloody hell... that’s... where is he?”

  “Place called Landing. Want to bet it’s the original landing site for the colony?”

  “No bet. I know it is. The archive here is extensive and the colonisation is documented in the history section. That’s where I’ve been looking mostly. There’s no mention of his location though, just references to him as an entity in decisions made at that time.”

  “Do we know if Landing was bombed?”

  “It was,” Eric said grimly. “Not with kinetics though,” he said, sounding a little more hopeful.

  Nukes were just as bad, worse in some ways. There were areas of the planet still hot enough that even a viper would have to limit exposure. Gina guessed they would be finding out how hot Landing was at some point.

  “You want to meet there?”

  “No. I want you to fly here and meet me. There’s something I need you to see.”

  Gina frowned. He didn’t sound happy about something. “You want to clue me in?”

  “Not until you get here. Alpha-One out.”

  “Alpha-Two out.” Gina said and turned her attention to driving. “What the hell was that about?”

  Haverington, Kushiel

  Eric appeared on Gina’s sensors as soon as she was in range of the city, but she couldn’t land the shuttle at his location. She chose to land next to the other shuttle on the ice over what had once been a park at the centre of the city. She was taking for granted that Eric had chosen it after surveying the ice with his GPR and that it was safe.

  She landed safely and deployed the APC again.

  She drove carefully through the eerie streets of the capital. The looming buildings with their empty windows were oppressive and sad. The weather was fine for a sub-zero climate. Skies were clear and painfully beautifully blue, but it did little to raise the oppressive feel of the place. She drove passed shattered buildings, obviously the results of a battle, and back into untouched streets heading toward Eric’s location. His icon was clear on her sensors, but he wasn’t in the library she had located for him. He was city blocks away.

  She found Eric standing in a street in the commercial district of the city waiting for her. She parked a couple of metres from him, sealed her helmet, and climbed down from the cab. His APC was parked just beyond him. She ran a sensor sweep as she walked toward him, trying to discover what he found interesting. The buildings were the usual sort of thing. Commercial towers, modern for their time she was sure, but looking old before their time with windows gone and bare steel showing the depredations of a climate they weren’t designed to handle.

  “So,” Gina began. “What’s up?”

  For his answer, Eric beckoned her to follow him toward one of the buildings. She shrugged and followed. He stopped and looked back at her before drawing her attention to the structure.

  Gina saw what had him concerned right away. The doors should have been buried by up to three metres or so of ice, but they weren’t. The other buildings had snow and ice piled against them, half covering their entrances, but this one had been cleared. It was obvious now her attention had been drawn to it that someone had cut the ice into a gentle ramp and then cut away the doors. She could see them lying on the floor inside.

  “Did you...?”

  Eric shook his head and crouched. Gina joined him to study the tracks in the ice. “See here and here?”

  Gina nodded.

  “Droid tracks.”

  “Yeah,” Gina said remembering the marks left by the use of her IED droid earlier. “Have you been inside?”

  “Briefly. I wanted you to see this before going deeper in.”

  Gina nodded and they entered the building.

  Eric switched on a powerful hand lamp to illuminate the room. As soon as he did, Gina knew she was standing in a bank, and that someone had been here before them. Of course it was possible the mess was part of the chaos caused by the evacuation of the city. Desperate people losing their heads might have thought they would need money to survive, but she doubted that was the case here. This looked like the aftermath of a salvage operation, and she knew no salvaging had been sanctioned.

  The doors had been roughly cut away and allowed to fall inside. Beyond them, the floors were iced over but only thinly, indicating to her that the doors had not been down for long. Eric played the beam of his light over the scene, and stopped. Most of the bank’s droids were still in place. Like sentinels standing guard, they stood waiting for customers who would never come. The main counter divided the space, but the central section had been destroyed. The people responsible hadn’t bothered with niceties. It hadn’t been surgically cut away. It looked to Gina as if they had used demo charges to blow their way through. Probably had to, she mused as she studied the damage. Bank security would have dictated the partition be armoured.

  Eric led the way and Gina followed him into the restricted area of the bank. She proved herself correct as she passed the droids, and saw the damage more closely. Demo charges had been rigged to blow through the armoured wall. The telltale burn marks and splintered steel, still covered in the remains of synthetic wood to hide the armour, told the tale. She eyed a fallen droid. Half its face had been blown off, left where it had fallen, but still smiling.

  Gina shivered.

  Eric stopped. “Surprise surprise, but not really.”

  Gina grunted. As Eric, she was unsurprised to find the vault had been blown. The vault door stood wide, its locking system neatly blown away. She ducked inside and found more mess, but it was obvious the thieves had methodically broken into every drawer and every safe within the place, only discarding the things they couldn’t sell or trade onto the floor. She wondered how much loot they had salvaged... no not salvaged. This was grave robbing. The safe boxes in here had been people’s personal stuff. Dead people’s personal stuff. The bank’s platinum reserves were probably held elsewhere on Kushiel, but there would have been a sizable amount kept here. Even today, despite government disapproval, platinum wafers were still universally accepted as currency.

  “What do we do about this?”

  Eric s
hrugged. “Nothing I can think of. They’re long gone.”

  Then why had he even bothered to bring her here to see it? Eric turned away and retraced his steps. She shook her head and looked back at the sad remains of people’s lives. It wasn’t right, but she couldn’t think of anything to do either. She headed back to the street.

  “We heading for Landing now?”

  Eric stopped on his way to his APC and looked back. “We could do that, or fly back up to the ship and start fresh tomorrow. Preference?”

  Gina looked toward the sun and estimated flight times. It would be dark when they reached Landing, but she would prefer to stay on planet. It would waste so much time going back to Hobbs only to fly back down tomorrow. She explained her thoughts and Eric agreed to stay the night.

  “You can come to my place for dinner,” Eric said and Gina laughed. “My shuttle’s autochef can handle a pizza I’m sure.”

  She made a face.

  “Don’t like pizza?” Eric said in shocked tones. “That’s damn near unpatriotic!”

  “Huh?”

  “You come from Faragut and you were a marine. Double whammy.”

  Gina snorted. “Despite what you may have heard about marines, we are... were not all pizza eating beer swilling grunts. Some of us know one end of a chopstick from the other you know. We don’t all eat with our fingers.”

  Eric snorted. “And the Faragutians?”

  Gina scowled. “You won’t hear me defending Faragut, crack about patriotism or not, but I’ve seen them eat linguine and plenty of other stuff. They don’t live on pizza, and neither do I.”

  “Does this mean you’re not interested in coming over?”

  “Nope. I’ll be there but I’ll do the cooking. I know a few good codes you’ll like.”

  Eric nodded. “See you there then.”

  She watched Eric mount up, and then trotted to her own APC to do the same. Eric pulled out while she settled herself. She let him get a good lead before starting after him.

  Aboard Alpha-One, Landing, Kushiel

  Eric leaned back in his seat and took another mouthful of his coffee. “You were right; you do know a few good codes.”

  Gina popped a last ball of rice into her mouth and smiled. She had chosen Chinese on purpose. His crack about marines and Faragut had struck a nerve. He wasn’t far wrong about her home world’s rep, not that she cared to learn what the current fashionable stereotype happened to be, but proving she knew a good menu when she saw one had suddenly become important. Hiller was her platoon’s gourmet, not her, but she had learned a thing or two over the years, and Hiller had added to her increasingly discriminating palette with trips to Stirlings in Petruso with their friends. She could hold her own with Eric, though she was betting he would wipe the floor with her where wine was concerned. Cliché it might be, but beer really was more her style. If Eric was a wine snob, well, she would deal, disappointing as that would be. She grinned.

  “What’s funny?”

  Gina shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Come on, you’ve thought of something.”

  “No, really, it’s nothing,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

  Eric shrugged. “Shoot.”

  “You might not like it,” she warned, thinking it better than just blurting it out. “The San Luis op. Did you save the others aboard the dropship?”

  Eric stared off into the distance remembering. “Did I save them?” He sounded grim. “We always tried to save people in the beginning. It seemed like that was our mission, but of course that changed. We went from saving people to avenging them in short order. Our missions became seek and destroy. We were like you once, Gina, all of us. Even the General was like you back then; a young captain determined to do the right thing, but he changed. We all had to, or go insane. You’ve only seen one side of him you know, but even so I think you’ve already started to wonder about him, haven’t you?”

  Gina opened her mouth to answer, but no words would come out.

  “No need to answer. Your loyalty to him and the regiment can remain unstrained a while longer. Just remember that there’ll come a day when you have to decide how much your honour is worth. I remember the first time I had to compromise mine for the good of the regiment. The General is fond of that saying. The good of the regiment. The problem is, the good of the regiment is what he says it is. The same goes for the good of the Alliance. Who decides? He does. He sends us out and we do what he orders because he says the Alliance will be better if this thing happens, or worse off if that thing does... this or that person must die, for the good of the Alliance.

  “Well,” Eric shrugged. “I guess we do still trust him even after everything. Why else are we still doing his bidding? Maybe because we’re so old we don’t know any other way to live. Maybe we need someone to lead us because we can’t think for ourselves anymore.”

  God he sounded bitter. “And maybe you’re just full of crap,” Gina said callously. “Maybe deep down you know he makes the hard choices, the choices you know must be made, and you’re secretly relieved because you don’t have the balls to make them yourself.”

  Eric smiled gently. “Maybe so. You asked if I saved them that day. The truth is we saved each other every day back then. We didn’t keep count then and don’t now. Did I save them that time? I cut the fuel just as you did in your sim, and left them in hibernation. The SAR shuttles lifted them into orbit for repairs and redeployment. I know you’re wondering about the burned ones. They survived. They were even sane when they came back online, as much as any of us were after San Luis.

  “San Luis was a defining moment for us. For vipers I mean, but also the Alliance. The entire regiment fought in those battles, something not done before that. It changed things. The General certainly became more aggressive after seeing the survivors, and I think that was when he began to ah... manage his superiors. I noticed at the time that our missions changed in surprising ways.”

  Gina knew her history and agreed with Eric. Events could be explained in different ways of course, but if one were paranoid enough to assume there had, or could have been, one mind orchestrating things, then certainly that man had been General George Burgton. Vipers had exploded onto the scene after San Luis. They had suddenly been everywhere, given almost a free hand or so it seemed. No doubt Burgton had needed to negotiate or persuade his superiors to allow his men to perform those missions, but that was all behind the scenes. It had appeared very different on the surface. Vipers were sent in ahead of major land forces to break Merkiaari command and control structures, and wherever Merkiaari popped up, so too did the vipers, sometimes anticipating their incursions like the catastrophe at Bethany’s World.

  “Well,” Gina said. “I’m glad you did save them.”

  Eric shrugged as if it meant nothing.

  She drank her coffee and tried to think of something else to talk about. Eric just sat there watching her, and she couldn’t think of anything but work to fill the silence. She was about to bring up tomorrow’s itinerary when he broke the silence, but his choice of subject didn’t please her.

  “Faragut,” Eric said. “You were born there.”

  She nodded but he hadn’t asked a question so she restricted herself to the nod.

  Eric’s lips twitched but he didn’t laugh. “Tell me about it.”

  “Nothing to tell. I was born there, eighteen years later I left. Never went back.”

  “Hmmm, family?”

  “Nope.”

  “None?”

  “None I know of, and no I didn’t look.”

  “Why not?”

  Gina sighed and put her cup aside. “You ever visit Faragut?”

  Eric nodded.

  “Then you know what it’s like. Faragut is a throwback. It’s barely a democracy. I’m amazed that the Alliance accepted their form of government at all. Constitutional monarchy for Chrissakes,” Gina snorted. “Would you go back there?”

  “I’ve always liked the romance of monarchies,” Eric mused s
eriously. “Feudal lords beholden to the crown governing their lands in peace and prosperity. It sounds idyllic. The lords have a social contract with their people to govern honourably. There are worse governments out there, Gina. When I was there, Faragut was stable and its people had a high standard of living. King Richard was beloved; his heir was doing his duty in the Alliance Navy.”

  Gina grimaced. “Spoken like a tourist. The government serves the crown. The King as head of state makes broad policy, and the House of Lords and House of Commons debate and wrangle over the details. It’s a democracy because the commoners vote for their representative to sit in the lower house, but it’s a democracy in name only. The King can dissolve Parliament at any time. He rules Faragut, and he’s commander in chief of Faragut’s armed forces. Parliament serves him by carrying out his edicts.”

  “I get all that, Gina, I knew it before, but what has that to do with you? You were a commoner I assume?”

  “Orphan, but yes. I was looked after and educated in a state crèche.”

  “Ah,” Eric said more subdued. “That explains it.”

  She nodded. The crèche system was a great idea in theory. It amounted to state run orphanages that cared for unwanted children. They cared, clothed, taught, and trained them to be useful members of society. A worthy goal one would think, but come the age of majority—eighteen on Faragut—the young adults had to pay back the state with national service either in the military or in the factories. The only way to avoid what amounted to a fifteen-year hitch of legalised slavery was to emigrate. Emigration takes money, making that an impossible dream. She had chosen another route off world with a five-year hitch with the Alliance marines. She had left and never looked back, and loved the life, re-upping with the marines twice more until Colonel Flowers seduced her away and into the regiment.