Alabaster Noon Read online

  “Sure.”

  “Once you cleanse the galaxy of all of these killers, then what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I asked. Once you’ve killed off three entire races what are you going to do then?”

  “Celebrate a job well done?” Nigel shrugged. “Maybe I’ll go to fucking Disneyland.”

  “No. No, you won’t. You won’t be celebrating anything. You will have just made yourself public enemy number one to the rest of the alien races in the galaxy. You will be seen as such a threat they will all unite to destroy you in particular, Asbaran Solutions at a minimum, and probably the entire race that spawned you. We’re already under attack by the majority of the Mercenary Guild; if you wiped out three races, humanity itself would be under attack…and with the entire galaxy’s resources being used against us this time. There’s no way we could win. We’d be slaughtered.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “We take them to court.”

  “We…what? Take them to court?”

  “Yeah, we take them to the Galactic Union court and get a ruling against them. We show them we aren’t crazy, and that we have a legitimate gripe. We get the galactic court to go along with it, and then we have a legal mandate to wipe them out.”

  “Galactic court, huh? What court is that, exactly? And where?”

  “Umm…I’m not really sure, but if there are things that are illegal, like nuking planets from orbit or using AIs, there has to be some sort of court to adjudicate it.”

  “Funny thing, I’ve never heard of that court. Everything I’ve ever heard of was done by the Merc Guild…and since the Veetanho seem to be running that, I have a hard time believing we’ll have a sympathetic ear there.”

  Sansar ran through the information stored in her pinplants on galactic government and couldn’t find a mention of an actual court. “So…uh…you may be right. I can’t find any examples of any courts other than those run by the various guilds.”

  Nigel smiled. “Okay, so your court idea may have merit…but it looks like I’m going to get a chance to kill some of them first. Once we kill off all the Veetanho, MinSha, and Besquith and we replace them with races that aren’t completely corrupt, I’ll take your court idea under advisement.”

  Sansar sighed. “Nigel, I’m sorry, but that isn’t going to work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I really came here to tell you is I think Peepo knows where New Warsaw is.”

  Nigel’s brows knit. “How can she know where it is? We don’t even know where it is, and we’re on our way there.”

  “I had a dream—”

  “Of course you did,” Nigel said. His smile took away some of the sarcasm he couldn’t keep out of his voice. Although his mood appeared to have improved, his visage developed a haunted look as his thoughts turned to Alexis.

  “—I had a dream you and I were defending a system that was heavily fortified. There were missile stations on asteroids, battle stations with heavy lasers, and a lot of ships. It was a battle to decide everything…and at the end of the battle I saw it—Prime Base. That’s what we were defending. I had this dream when we were in Golara. Alexis laughed when I told her about it. She said there would never be a battle for Prime Base she wasn’t part of…but now she’s gone, along with Jim, and it’s up to us. This is exactly what I saw!”

  Nigel thought for a moment and then nodded, his face grim. “With Paka going over to Peepo’s side, I guess it’s possible she took the coordinates over to Peepo with her.” He took a deep breath and let it out, shaking his head. “We’re fucked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you see the fleet Peepo had amassed?” He waved a hand toward his Tri-V display. “I was just going over the battle, looking for things we could have done better, to get an edge for next time. The fleet that was chasing us at the end of that abortion on Earth was huge; how are we going to stop something that size?”

  “I don’t know,” Sansar replied, “but I can tell you we’ve been working on New Warsaw’s defenses for ten years.”

  “You have?” Nigel asked, a tinge of hope in his voice.

  “Yes, the Horde’s been working on the system’s defenses for ten years.”

  “Is it going to be enough?”

  Sansar shrugged. “I don’t know. There was so much more we wanted to do…and that was before Peepo trotted out that dreadnought, or whatever it was.” She squared her shoulders, and straightened to her full, almost five feet, height. “Like I said, I don’t know, but it’s going to have to be, or an awful lot of people are going to die. I doubt Peepo is going to settle for just capturing it; she’s going to destroy it. Along with every man, woman, and child.”

  “A repeat of what happened to my country,” Nigel said, with a curt nod. “We cannot allow this to happen. In Alexis’ memory, we will not.” He paused again, then his eyes focused on Sansar. “We won’t have much time once we get back; they will surely be hot on our trail. If we have a week to prepare, we will be lucky. What have you done so far, and what do we still need to put into place?”

  * * * * *

  Chapter One

  São José dos Campos, Brazil, Earth

  Major James Good winced as he injected himself with the last dose of nanites from the medkit dispenser. If the alternative—death from radiation poisoning—hadn’t been worse than the pain of the dispenser, he doubted he could have pushed the injection button. I have no idea how those CASPer pilots do this all the time, he thought. He shook his head. He had no idea why he’d thought going to São Paulo was a good idea. Intel people belong behind the lines, not trying to get first-hand accounts of the battle.

  He looked up once the tears cleared from his eyes. Corporal Bolormaa Enkh was studiously going through imagery on her terminal and had shifted slightly so her back was to him. The small twitches in her shoulders probably weren’t from her trying to stifle a laugh because of his scream. Good’s shoulders slumped; no, she probably was laughing, after all.

  Good sighed. “Okay, I’m done. And you don’t have to tell me I should have stayed here with you; I am well-aware.” She turned around in the chair with a smile on her face, and he could feel his cheeks turn crimson. “I’m also aware that I might have yelled out a little when I dosed myself with the nanites.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “A little? You squealed like a newborn—”

  “Fine,” Good interrupted. “I screamed. You dose yourself with one of those things, and we’ll see how you like it.”

  “No thanks, sir. The CASPer drivers have told me how badly it hurts. That’s why I was quite happy to stay right here.”

  “Let’s just move on, shall we?” Good asked. “Were you able to trace the signal out of São Paulo?”

  “Actually, yes, I was. As you directed, I launched all of our new dragonfly drones and had them concentrate on the towers you identified.”

  “See?” Good asked with a smile. “There was a good reason for me to be there.”

  “Yes, sir. If it makes you feel better to think so; however, these aren’t the ones Spartan developed. While you were out playing soldier, we got a shipment of the Mark Two dragonflies, which are bigger and can transmit while they’re still in flight. Had you waited we could have searched for the towers from here.”

  Good frowned.

  “But since you were there,” she said hurriedly, “it allowed me to cut down on the time it would have taken to find and identify the comms sites.”

  “And?”

  Enkh smiled. “And yes, I was able to find the Merc Guild headquarters. It’s at a facility just outside Ubatuba, southeast of here.”

  “How do you know?” Good asked. “I thought we could only get a line of bearing from the dragonfly.”

  “We could…but they had a primary and a backup laser comm link, and I found both of them. Where those two lines cross…voila! There’s Peepo’s Palace.”

  “She has a palace set up down here? How did we mis
s it?”

  “We didn’t miss anything. It isn’t really a palace; from the road, it just looks like a big hacienda outside of town, like many others that exist.”

  “Then how do you know this is her operations center? Tortantulas at the gates?”

  “No, nothing as obvious as that, which is why we haven’t found it before now. All the outside security is human, and they aren’t in merc uniforms. That said, though, they all look like mercs, and I got a facial recognition hit from one of them.”

  Enkh turned back to her console, tapped a couple of buttons, and the picture of a man in uniform came up. She pointed and said, “Gotcha. This is Major Vels Lucas of the Varangian Guard. He was wandering around, checking out the defenses, and one of the drones got a good picture of him. It’s an exact match with his Merc Guild info.”

  She looked up and smiled. “If that weren’t enough, I present to you, Exhibit B.” She pressed a button and the Tri-V switched to an overhead view of a cluster of buildings and a small landing pad. “This is on the other side of the hill from the hacienda, out of site from casual observers. All of these buildings—and especially the landing area—all show signs of having been recently constructed.” She zoomed in on an orange blob. “And here are two robotic builders, laying on their sides. Looks like they broke, and they were pitched off to the side. Based on the lack of degradation, I would say the landing strip was finished within the past two weeks.”

  “Well done,” Good replied. “It’s good to see you weren’t just sitting around while I was out risking my life to get the intel.” He ignored her snort. “Did you get anything else?”

  “I did, and you’re going to like this even better.”

  “Better than finding the Merc Guild’s headquarters?”

  “Yes, sir.” She tapped a few more buttons. “We’ve gotten a few reports on what appears to be a group of friendly mercs who are still on the ground in São Paulo.”

  “Friendly mercs? I thought all of them surrendered.”

  “I thought so, too, but then I heard about a patrol of Besquith getting slaughtered.”

  “Maybe it was some sort of rivalry with one of the other races.”

  Enkh shook her head. “When they reported the patrol missing, I sent a few of our dragonflies to see if I could find them. They were on a rooftop, and they were all dead. There was no evidence of anyone else being there, but they’d all been shot. It looked like whoever’d been there was short, too; the wounds were fired at an upward angle into them.”

  “So, maybe a squad of mercs firing from prone positions?”

  “I thought that, too, so I went looking for them, hoping to make contact. I thought that after killing the Besquith, they’d head toward the Merc Guild—if they could find it—looking for a little payback on Peepo.”

  “And you found them there?”

  “No. Once I found the Merc Guild, I began tracking back from it, looking for them, but never found them. Then I realized that would probably be what Peepo would do, too, when she found out the Besquith were dead, so I landed a spread of dragonflies in the other direction and put them on standby. If there was motion, they would wake up. It was a long shot…”

  “But it worked?”

  Enkh looked up and smiled. “Here is the current feed from it.” The monitor changed to a view of jungle, with the screen panning up and down as if someone were holding it while walking.

  “Whoever has it is short,” Good said, looking at the perspective.

  “Let me back it up a bit.” Enkh froze the image and restarted it from when it was activated. There was a flash of brown—the motion that turned it on—then the view shifted as the drone was picked up, and a face filled the camera’s view. The creature looked a bit like a monkey, but had huge, intelligent eyes and big ears that sported tufts of fur at the ends. “It’s safe to say contact has been made—the Fae have our drone!”

  * * *

  Merc Guild Detention Facility, Ubatuba, Brazil, Earth

  “What do you want?” Jim Cartwright asked the woman at his cell’s door.

  “I wanted to see if you were okay,” she said.

  Despite everything, it felt good to hear her voice, and that pissed him off. He stood up, a little too hastily, and the nanite-attached chains around his wrist were jerked hard enough that he felt the skin tear. “Do I look okay, bitch?” he snarled.

  “Jim…”

  “You don’t get to call me that, ever again,” he yelled, spittle flying from his lips. She stiffened slightly and took a step back, as if he had the slightest chance of getting free and reaching her. In his mind’s eye, he imagined getting his hands around her neck. He shook his head to clear the thought, then took a long, shuddering breath, managing to get a little of his control back. “It’s Colonel Cartwright to you.”

  She took a step forward into the dank cell. The small light showed some detail of her face, so recognizable to him after many hours of time together. He could remember seeing her waking up next to him in the dark—as it was now—the bathroom light of his tower suite casting one perfect breast in profile.

  “Colonel Cartwright,” she said. “Why did you come back?”

  “To kick the stinking aliens off our planet,” he said.

  “The planet didn’t want you to do that. Nobody asked you to return.”

  “You mean the Republic government didn’t want us to return.” She shrugged. “Well, here we are.”

  She looked him up and down for a second. “You’ve lost weight.” It was his turn to shrug. “Is Watchmaker okay?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Can you touch her mind?”

  Jim’s eyes narrowed. He’d never shared any of that; he’d never told her about Splunk’s telepathic ability.

  “I can help her,” she said. “I like her, and she liked me.”

  “You had her fooled, too, you know that? Quite the actor, you are.”

  “Part of my training.”

  “Captain McKenzie’s training?” She just looked at him. “What do you want, Captain?’

  “Like I said, to see how you are.”

  He held out his hands, wincing from the pain. “Well, you saw.” Then he thought of something. “Peepo sent you, didn’t she?” She didn’t respond, and he laughed. “Aliens never understand Humans,” he said, laughing more. “Does she know what you did to me?” A slight nod. “But she sent you anyway.”

  She stood still, less than a meter from him, amidst the dishes from his earlier meal. He couldn’t see her eyes, only the slight movements of her shoulders gave any indication she was even breathing. What does she really want? “Get out,” he said. He backed up to the wall and used it to slide onto the simple bench.

  Adayn stood for another moment, then she quietly turned and left. The door closed behind her, leaving him alone in the mostly dark cell.

  * * *

  Merc Guild Command Center, Ubatuba, Brazil, Earth

  “You can go in,” the assistant said with a nod.

  Paka got up and walked into the office. It was so much more utilitarian than she’d expect her sister to have. Of course, Paka hadn’t seen her sister’s old office. Her sister stood up to greet her.

  “Hail the conquering hero,” General Peepo said, bowing her head, whiskers flat against her muzzle in respect. “It’s so good to finally see my sister again.”

  “Just as good to see you, Peepo,” Paka said and bowed in return.

  “How did you survive so long working for those Humans?”

  “It was difficult, sometimes.”

  “I would think it was difficult all the time.” Peepo gestured to a chair, and Paka sat down. “I admit, this wasn’t what I imagined for the culmination of your mission. I always expected you to somehow slip a data packet to me with the location of New Warsaw.”

  “As I explained in my debriefing, I couldn’t. Nobody knows the stellar location. It’s amazingly well hidden for such a distinct system.” Paka laughed. “Cromwell is the most
suspicious Human I have ever known. Even more so than her mother was. All the program keys written by that AI are carefully accounted for.”

  “The AI,” Peepo said darkly. “I still think you should have blown your cover just to tell us about it.”

  “Even now? You know if I’d defected at any other point, they would have gone into a lockdown so thorough we’d never have found them.”

  Peepo looked at her with narrowed eyes, then laughed. “No, I guess you’re right.” She took a bottle of wine that came from their home world and poured them both a drink. “To the end of humanity’s interference in the grand plan, and to bringing them into the fold.” Paka raised her glass and Peepo matched it. “The Four Horsemen are gone from Earth.”

  Paka drank.

  “Now, long lost sister, what do you want?”

  Paka smiled, showing her tiny sharp teeth. “Command of the fleet attacking New Warsaw.”

  “I can’t give you the dreadnought.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s political. However, I can give you overall fleet command and a battleship of your own.” Paka’s eyes narrowed. “Who knows, maybe Admiral Galantrooka will err to some degree, and then it will be yours.” She finished her drink and handed Paka a data chip. “Courtesy of the Grimm, here’s the location to New Warsaw. Go finish what you started.”

  * * *

  After Paka left, Peepo brought her Tri-V to life.

  She gazed with interest at the numerous reports floating around her office. A hundred scientists were swarming over the Raknar in what remained of São Paulo, though they hadn’t made much progress yet because of the radiation levels. The Raknars’ power cores continued to be many times hotter than they should be, despite indications of full, unsaturated F11 stores.

  “We can only assume the pilots activated a contingency which put the reactors in this mode,” her chief researcher, an elSha named Pluis, had reported a few hours ago. Because of the radiation, the researchers could only work an hour at a time, despite the protective gear they wore.