Asbaran Solutions (The Revelations Cycle Book 2) Read online

  Mason looked back and forth between the pistol and Nigel’s eyes. Neither wavered. The look on Nigel’s face showed he was mad enough to do it.

  “You’ll be sorry.”

  “I’m already sorry I let you waste this much of my time. Now get the fuck out!”

  Mason turned and walked to the door. “You haven’t heard the last of me.” He walked out and slammed the door.

  Nigel found he could no longer hold the pistol steady, so he safed it and dropped it on the desk before he accidentally shot someone.

  “That could have gone better,” Steve remarked. “While you did prove who’s boss, you’re now out a company commander.”

  Nigel fell backward into the chair, all of his nerves on fire with the adrenaline rush. He took a couple of deep breaths, shook his hands out, and then took another deep breath. “No, he’ll be back once he calms down,” Nigel said.

  “I doubt he’ll ever be back.”

  “Well, you may know a lot more about finance and Einstein than I do, but growing up in one of the Horsemen families, I know a lot more about people than you do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? He’s in love with my sister. He wants her back at any cost, even to the point of losing his job or pissing off the temporary boss. It’s the only reason he’d be dumb enough to want to go on this mission. It’s certainly not the pay, and this mission is dangerous as all hell. The only reason anyone would show up wanting to go is to save my sister.” He chuckled. “It’s the only reason I’m going.”

  “So how are you going to get him back?”

  “Easy—all I have to do is wait. Right now, he’s probably calling all of his contacts looking for someone with a ready force he can convince to assault Keppler 62 to try and get my sister back.”

  “What if he finds one?”

  “He won’t. There’s no money in it. As far as they know, there’s no contract to be assumed, so no company is going to want to take it on. For him, it’s a personal decision to do it, but for everyone else, it’s a business decision to not. He’ll be back, because I’ve got the same problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Although it makes sense for our company’s bottom line, and we can complete the contract if it all works out, it’s personal for me, too. I have to do it, and once he calms down, he’ll realize his best chance to see my sister alive again is to come back and lead the mission so I don’t get everyone killed.”

  “You’d let him lead the assault after that display?”

  “Absolutely. If he has enough balls to go up against the head of one of the Horsemen in his own office, even if it’s me, he’s the one I want in charge.” Nigel chuckled. “I certainly don’t want to lead the mission. He’s right; I don’t know shit about leading a company of mercs. I’m learning, but there’s no way I can learn everything I need in time. I would have picked up the damned teddy bear as a souvenir.”

  “Me too,” Steve replied. He sighed. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s Rule Two?”

  “Always have an ace in the hole.”

  Asbaran Solutions, Houston, Texas, USA

  “Sir, Mr. Mason is here and is requesting a moment of your time.”

  Steve looked up from the report he was briefing and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Told you so,’ Nigel mouthed at his friend. “Please disarm him and send him in.”

  Mason walked in, much calmer than when he left the day before. He came to a position of attention, his eyes focused somewhere slightly above Nigel’s head, his back ramrod straight. “Mr. Shirazi,” he said after the briefest of sighs, “I would like—”

  “That’s enough,” Nigel said, cutting him off. “You’re hired. Welcome to Asbaran Solutions, Sergeant First Class Mason.”

  “Just like that? You’re not going to make me apologize and tell you I was wrong?”

  “Just like that.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “Sure, a little bit, but the truth is, you weren’t wrong—I’m not qualified to lead the mission.”

  “So you’re going to let me lead it?”

  “Of course I am, you’re the right person to lead. You’re the only one we have with the experience and the skills required to do it successfully, and I don’t have time or money to hire someone else to lead it. Nor would I trust them more than I do you. But I’m still going.”

  “Wait, you’re what? I thought you said I was leading the mission.”

  “You are. You will be in charge, however, I’m going and I will have the overall say-so on certain aspects of the mission. Look at it this way—you’re in charge of tactics; I’m in charge of strategy. You’re too emotionally involved to lead this operation without an advisor who has a sense of…detachment. That’s me; I may like my sister, but I’m emotionally detached from my family. It’s something I’ve had years of practice with.”

  “And if I still say, ‘no way I’m going if you go’?”

  “Then I will have you escorted from the building again, only this time I won’t let you back in. I appreciate your strength of conviction, but I hoped I had made my point yesterday. I am the president of this company, even if I’m only the acting president, and I alone get to say who comes and goes. If you can’t live with that, I don’t have a place for you, on this mission or any of the others I am currently contemplating.”

  “Others?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say, until I have your word you’ll respect my position of authority, whether or not you respect my skills.”

  “No chance of getting you to sit this one out?”

  “None.”

  “Then I’m in. Also, you can remove your hands from under your desk. You won’t need the pistol.”

  “I didn’t think I would,” Nigel said. “But it’s always good—”

  “—to have an ace in the hole,” Mason finished.

  Houston Starport, Houston, Texas, USA

  “Damn,” Nigel said with a sigh. He shaded his eyes from the scorching south Texas sun as he looked down the ramp area of the 9,000-foot-long Runway 17R. In addition to the enormous hangar Mason and Nigel had just walked out of, two more cavernous hangars lay to the south, surrounded by a variety of support buildings and other structures.

  Although the field had housed a number of United States military, NASA, and general aviation tenants in its 300 years of continuous operation, all of it now belonged to Asbaran Solutions. At least until the creditors came to take it away.

  “What?” Mason asked, coming to stand next to Nigel. He looked in the direction his boss was staring. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Yeah, that’s just it. The last time I was here, about 10 years ago, this place was a beehive of activity. The ramp was full of dropships, loaders raced back and forth prepping them for flight, and people covered the entire area like a horde of ants. Now…it’s just us.” He shook his head as he turned to walk back to the hangar they’d come from. The three aging KX9 Phoenix dropships looked forlorn, sitting by themselves in the center of the massive hangar. “And the remains of our fleet.”

  “What once was, can be again,” Mason said philosophically as he caught up to walk alongside him. “Yeah, we lost some equipment and some damn good folks, but if we can pull this off, Asbaran Solutions’ name will still mean something.”

  Nigel noticed Mason had said “we.” Apparently, Mason already felt like he was part of the team, but Nigel didn’t know if that was because of his love for Parisa or if it was just the way mercs thought. Maybe once you’re hired, you’re immediately considered to be part of the team. Nigel hoped he survived the mission so he could find out which was true.

  “You said ‘if we can pull this off,’” Nigel noted. “Are you worried we can’t?”

  Mason stopped, causing Nigel to stop as well. “I won’t lie,” Mason said. “Your family had some of the best-trained folks and state-of-the-art equipment available. They were soundly b
eaten four times; our opponents wiped out the initial garrison, killed your father and your brother, and they captured your sister. We have fewer troops, our equipment is shit, and I have a newb who wants to ride shotgun over me. Our odds of pulling this off are damn near zero; it’s a testimony to how much I love your sister that I’m even willing to try it at all. When we pull this off, hopefully, you’ll remember to tell her that.”

  Nigel chuckled. “Assuming I’m still around, I will.”

  “Being able to defend yourself will help with that. Have you been to the range yet?”

  “Yeah, I went there once. The new personal laser rifles finally arrived, so I went and shot one of those since I’ve never fired one before. The last time I went shooting before that was with my grandfather.” He paused and then asked, “Did we ever find out what caused the delays?”

  “Yes, sir. Apparently some nut job named Chris Sommerkorn in Logistics sat on the requisitions. By the time he went to make the purchase, all the contract offers had expired and had to be renegotiated.”

  “What the hell did he do that for?”

  “Well, the guy wrote a pile of reports on various issues…firing rate, stopping power, that kind of stuff...and gods can that guy write! He must write like 10,000 words a day.”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing any of those reports,” Nigel noted.

  “That’s because he never sent them up. He wrote them, but then got bogged down in editing. They’re all still sitting on his desk.”

  “Really? How did someone like that get hired?”

  Mason shrugged. “He had a good fitness report from Cartwright’s Cavaliers. I don’t know...they must have written him a good report so he wouldn’t fight it when they shit-canned him.”

  “Do me a favor?”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  “Write him a similar report and shit-can him.”

  “With pleasure.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Eight

  Chairman’s Office, Asbaran Solutions, Houston, Texas, USA

  Steven looked up from the report he was reading. “Have you seen the estimates on selling off some of our F11 stores?” he asked.

  “No,” Nigel replied. “Was I supposed to do something with it?”

  “No, I didn’t mean, ‘Did you look at it?’ I meant, ‘Have you seen it?’ It was here earlier, but now it isn’t. I was wondering if you had taken it.”

  “No, I haven’t seen it, but I was curious how much we could get for the F11. Do you remember what it said?”

  “No, I don’t; I hadn’t had a chance to read it yet.”

  “When did it go missing?”

  “Hmm…I had it right before the meeting we had with Mason and Spivey, but after that, it was gone.”

  “One of them must have accidentally picked it up.”

  “Maybe…” Steve said, his head cocked to the side in thought, “but are you sure it was an accident?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m asking if you’re sure it was accident. When I first got here, I noticed some of my files seemed to go missing for a while. They would always show back up, but they were definitely gone for a time. At first, I thought I had just misplaced them, but then you mentioned you thought we had a mole. After that, I started watching my files, and I noticed some of them were disappearing.”

  “And you think it’s either Mason or Spivey?”

  “No, it can’t be Mason; the files were disappearing before he got here. It has to be Spivey.”

  “It can’t be Spivey. He’s been working for Asbaran longer than I’ve been alive; he would have been found out long before this. Maybe he was just using them for projects he was completing.”

  “You know, I’d be tempted to believe that, but the last two files that disappeared detailed financial opportunities we were pursuing, and before we could act on their contents, the markets turned, and we lost out.”

  “Markets turn sometimes,” Nigel noted.

  “I think the quote is, ‘Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.’ If someone floods the market with F11 fuel tomorrow and drives the price down before we can sell ours, I think we’ve found our mole.”

  Chairman’s Office, Asbaran Solutions, Houston, Texas, USA

  “I’ll kill the motherfucker,” Nigel said, throwing a copy of the morning newspaper on the sofa next to Steve. In lurid letters, the headline screamed, “Price of F11 tanks in overnight trading.”

  “Spoken like a true spoiled brat who didn’t get his way.”

  “What do you mean?” Nigel asked.

  “I mean that killing him would be easy, especially with all the mercs and weapons you have access to…it might even feel satisfying for a brief time…but then what? Once he’s dead, what do you get from him?”

  Nigel drew back, his brows knitting. “Uh, nothing, I guess, but I’ll know we plugged our information leak.”

  “See Nigel, that’s the problem you’ve always had; you’re too short-sighted. If you’d read the paperwork you got when your father died, you might have come here and learned the trade. You might even have been named chairman when your brother got killed. But instead, you got mad and threw the invitation into the garbage. You’re doing the same here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I can see that. You’re missing the point; Spivey is your invitation.”

  “My invitation to what?”

  “To find out who’s behind all this. Spivey might be your leak, but he’s a link to someone somewhere else. If you kill him, it’s going to be awfully difficult to find out who’s paying him…and why.”

  “But it will close the leak.”

  “God, you can be frustrating sometimes.” Steve flipped through his papers for a moment, then he sighed. “Okay, let me try this again. You have someone who is passing on information about the company. This person is responsible for getting two of your family members killed, at least indirectly, and another one captured. He’s also brought this company to the edge of ruin. Killing him may be satisfying, but it won’t solve the problem—there’s someone or something out there that has a serious grudge against either your family or your company. If it’s the company, they may be satisfied when it goes under next month. If it’s you they’re after, though, killing Spivey isn’t going to get you any closer to the truth. In fact, you’ll just be making it easier for them to kill you too, if that’s what they’re after, because you won’t have any idea where the next attack is going to come from.”

  “But, I…” Nigel started, but then ground to a halt, his mouth hanging open as he contemplated his friend’s words. “Oh,” he finally said.

  “How eloquent. At least I think you finally understand what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Yeah, I do.” Nigel shook his head. “You’ve obviously given this a lot more thought than I have. What do we do?”

  “I think the first thing we need to do is get Mason involved, because we’re going to need some muscle.”

  “So you trust him? I mean, I trust him, but I think the current situation shows I may not read people as well as I thought.”

  “I do trust Mason, and I think you were right about why he’s here. We’re going to have to trust someone, and he’s at least an outsider. If our adversary has suborned Spivey, they may have other moles as well.”

  “And what if Mason is a plant too?”

  Steve shrugged, “If he’s working for the enemy, your first trip into combat with him isn’t going to go very well. Happily, I will be back here, far from it. Regardless, I doubt he’s been corrupted—he has too much of a personal nature invested in this endeavor.”

  “I think he’s out at the field working with the troops,” Nigel said. “Let’s go talk with him out there…away from any prying eyes.”

  Houston Starport, Houston, Texas, USA

  Unlike his earlier trip, this time the hangar was alive with activity, and Nigel, Steve, and Mason had to watch where they were goi
ng as they walked through the enormous structure. Forklifts carried pallets and crates from place to place at breakneck speed, larger vehicles brought in new equipment and machinery, and more people than Nigel had ever seen raced between the various piles, unloading and assembling a variety of maintenance and analysis systems. Weaponry was stacked along the north wall of the hangar, in close proximity to the firing range just outside. Next to the weapons, 10 Binnig MK 6 Combat Assault System, Personal (CASPer), suits stood silently in their maintenance harnesses, waiting for the technicians to service and arm them. Nigel could feel the draw of the suits—nearly 10 feet tall and almost 1,000 pounds of death and destruction.

  Mason sighed, bringing him back to the present. “So, the bottom line is we have at least one mole and potentially more?” Mason asked.

  “Yeah,” Nigel replied. “We’re pretty sure that at least Spivey is working for someone else. There may be more.”

  “Well, that’s just fucking great. I didn’t think it was possible for this operation to have a smaller chance of success. Thanks for proving me wrong.” He paused, obviously considering his options, then asked, “Before I decide whether or not I want to leave this organization, what are your intentions for dealing with the leak?”

  “Steve and I have been talking about it, and I think he’s right—finding out that Spivey’s a mole may actually be a good thing for a couple of reasons. First, now that we know there’s a leak, we can be very careful about what information we give out beyond the three of us.”

  “That might help us a little, but it isn’t going to alter the fact that the forces on Moorhouse will know we’re coming…and what crappy equipment and poorly trained troops we’ll be bringing.”

  “I thought you’d been training the troops,” Nigel said. “Aren’t they coming around?”

  “Yeah, they’re doing okay,” Mason replied, “but the equipment we have is still crap, and the enemy is still going to know we’re coming.”