Merkiaari Wars: 01 - Hard Duty (3 page)

The ship began its final approach to station. Nothing to do but wait until docked. He sat on his rack and waited staring at the bulkhead in silence. How many times had he been on missions like this now, on missions that could have been identical except for location?

Working...

Eric sighed and ignored the list of codenames as it scrolled by on his display. He didn’t want an answer to his question. He knew the answer was in the hundreds. It had been rhetorical, but his processor didn’t care and continued its task of filling his vision with holographic data. It wasn’t really holographic of course. It only seemed to hover before his eyes like a holotank display. No one but he could see it and not even he cared to read it. His internal damn computer was too literal, and Vipers could not forget anything.

Anything at all.

He was programmed with perfect recall; the idea had been to make them all better killers by making target acquisition at a glance instant and perfect. The routines in his programming were complicated and numerous. Together they were called Snapshot, and there was no way to turn it off. Not even his death would shut it down, well, not immediately anyway. He had seen comrades take careful aim and one final shot after they were already dead just to take their killers with them. It was freaky as hell, and scary. That would be him one day.

>_ 563

Eric sighed when the total blinked on and off. He erased the list with a coded thought and his vision cleared. Five hundred and sixty three missions the same as this one, or close enough for his damned literalist processor to count them. That probably meant a similar amount just outside its acceptable parameters. Its true/false subroutines were distressingly precise and were something every Viper had to take into account when asking for data. The days of real A.I computer architecture were centuries in the past, Douglas Walden and his hacker rebellion had seen to that.

Over five hundred missions like this one, and hundreds different enough to be excluded from the list, and they all meant nothing. The days when his battles did mean something ended with the Merki War. He spent his time now killing other Humans, not murderously vicious aliens bent on genocide. It was enough to make a statue weep.

How far they had fallen.

The Alliance and the regiment was all he had. All any Viper had really. They were his two reasons to exist. The General ordered and he obeyed. The General said the coups and mini wars had to be managed. So they were managed... by Vipers behind the scenes when that was possible, and when not possible the General had the President’s ear. Orders came down, and off they went to war once more... or battle at least. They had to keep the peace when it could be kept, and divert or bring the wars to a swift conclusion when it could not. The Alliance must remain strong when the next Merkiaari incursion occurred. And it would occur soon. Five years the General estimated. Just five more years and his existence would have meaning again.

>_ 0700:23 Docking commencing.

The sound of grapples and maintenance lines connecting were clearly audible. He could have used his sensors to detect people on the ship and station but there was no need. He could have slipped into the security net on the station and accessed a live feed of the ship’s final approach. He used to do that, he remembered. Long ago that was. He did not think on it too hard now; if he did, his processor would resurrect one or more memories and replay them. The damn thing was programmed that way.

He checked the synthskin glove on his right hand, but as before it was intact and hiding his weapon’s data bus. The data bus was the only obvious external difference between his enhanced body and a standard Human. The other one, his primary node was at the base of his spine and hidden by his clothes. As long as the glove remained undamaged, no one would know what he was.

>_0710:12

He watched the seconds tick by. The time on his display was set to Thurston local, as were the ship’s chronometers. That was standard for all ships when jumping in system. Made things easier to manage—traffic patterns and the like. Ships received the correct time and other information like trade prices and news bulletins from the beacons.

The sounds died away and Eric stood. He threw his duffel up onto his shoulder and left his cabin to join the few other passengers debarking here. None of them spoke. All of them were civilians of one kind or another. No tourists here, but then the Betty wasn’t a cruise ship. It was a freighter and only took a few passengers aboard to supplement meagre profits way out here in the Border Zone. Eric supposed these people were down on their luck spacers, they had the look. They would most likely be seeking a ship docked at station to take them on as crew, or to take them to another port where they could try again.

Eric followed the ramp out of the ship and stepped dockside. Multiple alerts competed for his cybernetically enhanced cerebrum’s attention, but he ignored most of them. As always, his sensors and programming leaned toward tiresome completeness. What did he care that leaving the ship had exposed him to an atmospheric pressure drop of a few hectopascals? Did he give a fuck that the station’s atmosphere was nitrogen rich and its temperature a few degrees low? No, but did his processor care, did it ever take instruction from him to suppress pointless alerts when there was no risk of harm to him? Of course not.

Nothing to do but keep on keeping on as they say.

“They are full of shit,” he growled. He shifted his duffle on his shoulder, took a deep breath, and folded himself away letting his cover personae take over his features. “Just another day on the job,” he whispered, the weariness in his voice not registering in his own ears after all these centuries.

Eric marched across the dock toward arrivals and departures board. He stopped, looking blankly at the departures section and was bumped from behind. He pasted on an annoyed expression and turned to see who had walked into him, already lowering his duffel to the floor.

“Oh excuse me, so sorry,” the stocky black man said. “Wasn’t paying attention there. Worried about my flight... can’t find it on the boards.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eric growled turning to look up at the departures again.

“No really, you must forgive me. You will won’t you, and shake on it?”

Eric gritted his teeth noticing the grins from those close enough to hear. He rolled his eyes at them and mouthed the word silently, “Bethanites!”

The onlookers grinned wider, nodding in sympathy.

Eric put on a smile and tuned toward the man again. “From Bethany’s World I assume?”

“Why yes! How did you know?”

This time the laughter was loud enough for the tourist—he must surely be one as he was dressed in flamboyant colours and ridiculous looking printed patterns—to notice. He looked around uncertainly, his smile slipping and Eric was suddenly tired of the pretence.

He held out his hand for a shake. “I’m Eric, honoured to meet you. I recognise your scrupulous manner as being from Bethany. I visited there once.”

“Ah, you are too kind, Eric. My name is Kenneth Hartley-Browne. Glad to make your acquaintance.”

Eric clasped Ken’s hand.

>_ Connection request. Accept [Y]es/[N]o?

>_ Y

>_ Connection Achieved... Stone, Kenneth. Master Sergeant 501st Infantry Regiment, serial number DGN-896-410-339.

>_ Incoming data packet... downloading.

>_ Download complete.

Eric shook Ken’s hand and palmed the key card he held. “Sorry to leave in such haste, but my shuttle departs soon.”

Ken smiled. “Quite all right. I must away to find my own transportation. Good bye to you.”

“Good bye,” Eric said and watched one of his oldest friends walk away.

Suddenly he couldn’t leave it like that. What if this was his last op? No one stayed lucky forever. Stone was already out of sight but that was no problem. He could have hacked into station comms easily enough, or used his built in comm. No one would have been the wiser. They didn’t know to monitor Viper freqs, and if they had they would have received encrypted bursts of data that to them would have amounted to garbage or background noise. TacNet (Tactical Network) was a quicker built in system dedicated to Viper systems alone. Totally secure. He quickly accessed it and contacted the only other Viper in the entire Thurston system.

“Ken... just wanted to say thanks. For everything,” he said silently, his words encoded by his processor and sent on their way.

“No big, just another recon op.”

Stone’s voice came to him as if his friend were standing a few feet away. He thought he was worried about the op, easy enough mistake he supposed. “It’s not that, Ken. It’s...” he couldn’t voice it. “It’s just...”

“Are you okay, brother?” Stone said, sounding concerned now.

Brother, yes, Stone was his brother in every way that mattered. His family—his birth family—were long dead and their descendants didn’t know him, but he still had brothers and sisters in the regiment. Everyone wearing the snakehead patch was family. He felt better remembering that; he wasn’t alone.

“I’m coming back there,” Stone said.

Eric cursed himself. He had taken too long to answer. Stone’s blue icon, clearly visible on his sensors among so many green ones denoting the civs on the station, reversed course.

“No, Ken. You have somewhere to be, yes?”

“Tigris, but it can wait. You need me now.”

“I’m okay, feeling my age I guess. I just didn’t want to let you go without saying it’s been an honour serving with you... in case, you know?”

“Bro... I feel the same. Nothing is gonna happen to you; not now, not ten years from now. Besides, the General says we have an appointment in five to kick alien butt. You wouldn’t want to miss that, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” Eric said grimly. He couldn’t kill enough Merkiaari in a thousand lifetimes to make up for what he and the rest of the Human race had lost. “Go, I’ll be fine. That’s an order if you need one.”

“Nah. I knew you were fine. Stone out.”

Eric watched Ken’s icon on his sensors. “God bless,” he whispered and turned his attention back to business as Stone headed for his ship’s dock.

He had no idea what Ken’s mission on Tigris was; probably something along similar lines as here on Thurston. It had no bearing on his own mission that he could see. Ken was often tasked with information gathering missions. He would be sent out to find trouble spots and assess whether the regiment needed to get involved. If it did, he would report that and facilitate any follow up missions by providing intel, or weapons, or any number of other useful things. The download would have any data Eric needed to succeed in his own mission, and the key card was probably to access a cache of weapons or something interesting like that. No doubt there was trouble on Thurston somewhere. The authorities might not even know about it yet, but it would be there simmering and ready to boil over. He wouldn’t be here otherwise and Ken was like the proverbial trouble magnet. If there was something here, it would have come to Ken’s attention one way or another.

Eric found a departing shuttle easily enough, but first there was customs and immigration to go through. Basic stuff out here in the Border Zone. Thurston wasn’t an Alliance member world and its citizens enjoyed a more liberal way of life. That was good and bad. Good when people played nice. No one liked too much government red tape and observation. Bad when people didn’t play nice and flouted laws designed to keep the peace and ensure everyone had a fair shake.

Thurston used to have a dictatorial government based upon corporate ownership of resources. Such company owned planets were numerous enough out here in the zone not to raise too many eyebrows, but Thurston had moved beyond that now and was making a serious bid for Alliance membership. There were prerequisites for that. Democratic rule being only the first hurdle.

“Identity please,” the trim looking woman wearing the blue uniform of a customs official said.

“Eric Martell, here looking for work.”

“Planet of origin?”

“Alizon,” Eric lied. He had no fear that his fake identity would fail. His simcode implant, though the same as millions of others implanted at birth in the core worlds and an integral part of his spinal column, was special in one important detail. It was programmable. His processor had quite a few identities saved in its database. “Where’s your scanner?”

The woman grimaced. “It’s on the fritz again. We’re still working the bugs out of the system; only had them six months.”

And there went another of the liberal benefits of living outside the core worlds on its way out the airlock. Babies born on Thurston from now on would have the simcode implant fitted. It was one of the indicators that real core world type civilisation had reached here. Not everyone would be pleased by that. Fertile ground for the kinds of problems he was often sent to deal with.

“So,” Eric nodded. “What next?”

“Sorry for the inconvenience, but I’ll need a blood sample before an identity card can be issued.”