On The Imperium’s Secret Service (Imperium Cicernus) (33 page)

Prather seemed to lean forward on his hands.  “Are you accusing me of working for the enemy?”

“I merely note that your surveillance missed at least one person working for the enemy,” Fitz said.  “I think that you need to investigate your own ranks – someone either missed the operative’s presence, or managed to suppress it for their benefit.  Who in your office might be working for the Secessionists?”

There was a long pause.  “I would have thought that they were
all
loyal,” Prather said, finally.  “But if you’re correct...”

“I made a deal with Richardson, after uncovering him by chance,” Fitz said.  “I suggest that you send a couple of
trustworthy
agents to pick him up, bring him in and then start the standard procedure for interrogating captured spies.  Once that’s done, you can arrange for his exile to a reasonably harmless world.  Amish, perhaps.  He couldn't cause any trouble there.”

Prather’s lips worked, angrily.  “It sticks in my craw to have to make deals with scum like him,” he said, bitterly.  “
I
never made a deal with him.”

“
I
did,” Fitz said, sharply.  “And if we should happen to acquire a reputation for not dealing honestly with people, how many others are going to willingly make deals with us?”  He shook his head.  “There is a priority here, Colonel.  That’s tracking down the Secessionists on this planet and dismantling their network piece by piece.  Richardson is useless to them now – they’ll know that he’s blown.  I think we had better watch out for attempts on his life, to shut him up before he can start talking.”

“Understood,” Prather said, sourly.  He looked up at Fitz.  “You do realise that I will be making an official report to Baron Yu about your failure to cooperate with my investigation?”

“I could also make a report about your failure to realise that you had been penetrated so badly,” Fitz said.  “I suggest that we hold off on angry missives until we actually manage to discover just how badly the local station has been...compromised.  I’d call for a team of inspectors if I were you, perhaps after you shuffle a few people to less sensitive posts.”

They locked eyes.  “Goddamn special agents,” Prather muttered, finally.  “You come in here and think that you know this place backward.”

“We have a reputation to keep,” Fitz said.  He smiled, charmingly.  “And now we’re the best of friends, might we start comparing notes?  Perhaps we should start by considering who else might have fallen prey to blackmail.”

Prather nodded, slowly. 

“I’m taking direct command of the investigation myself,” he said.  Mariko guessed that that was unusual, judging by Fitz’s complaints about how paperwork turned good agents into babbling morons.  “As you can see” – he opened a file and spread the pictures out on the desk – “there are
serious
security implications in the brothel’s clientele.”

“It certainly seems that way,” Fitz said.  By now, Imperial Intelligence had identified everyone who’d been arrested in the brothel, even if it hadn't been able to hold them for long without formally charging them.  “My, my; the Special Assistant to the Governor, a senior Imperial Navy Commodore, two heavy-duty businessmen who should know better than to get into bed with the Secessionists...”

He shrugged as he skimmed through the remaining file.  “And we have no way to know if they have been compromised or not,” he added.  “And what about the small fry?  Richardson was small fry and he managed to create a security nightmare all on his own.”

“They will all be investigated,” Prather assured him, “but the bigger fish have political friends who would go to bat for them if I tried to hold them longer than the allotted time span.”

“We could just charge them with Conduct Unbecoming,” Fitz pointed out, before shaking his head.  “But that charge wouldn’t really stick, would it?”  He smiled, thinly.  “Confront them all with the evidence, offer to bury the fact that they have been fucking alien women – for a certain value of
women
– in exchange for them taking loyalty tests.  If they refuse to take the tests, you would have grounds to confront their political allies with their nightly activities and probably destroy their political support.  I can't see the Governor being too happy with his Special Assistant after all this, can you?”

“Risky,” Prather observed.  “It could create a political stink.”

“So could the security nightmare created by a bunch of Secessionists operating right in the heart of the Sector Capital,” Fitz snapped.  “Deal with fallout first, and you might not have to worry about political blowback.”

“I hope you’re right,” Prather said.  “And my misguided fellow agents?”

“I suggest you start baiting traps,” Fitz said.  “Now...seeing you were kind enough to kill my dance partner, what do you know about him?”

***

“He’s one of ours,” the doctor said, as he pulled back the covering over the body.  Mariko had seen dead bodies before, but there was something inhuman about this one.  Five bullets had gone through his chest and head and yet, according to the reports, he’d kept trying to fight until his augments had lost the ability to keep him going.  “The augmentation he was given is identical to that used by Pathfinders and Marine Force Recon operatives.  He
doesn’t
seem to have the biomods given to augmented intelligence officers, which at least allows us to narrow down his origin a little.”

“But not enough,” Fitz said.  He sounded tired and unhappy.  It took Mariko a moment to realise that the man he’d fought had almost been a brother, a fellow augmented human.  “Can you pull a serial number off his implants?”

“I’m afraid not,” the doctor said.  “The moment they registered his brain death, they activated a suicide program that turned all of the recognisable components into dust.  That includes his ID chip and any programs his superiors might have used to contact him.  They also inflicted considerable damage to his genome.  Getting a clear DNA pattern to compare against the records may be impossible.”

“Keep working on it,” Fitz ordered, quietly.

Mariko put her hand on his shoulder, trying to provide support.  “How many augmented soldiers have been lost in the last two decades?”

“Hundreds,” Fitz said.  “Nearly seventy on Han alone – and believe me, that was the most shocking loss rate for the Pathfinders in recorded history.  Most of the records are highly classified; some of the nastier terrorist groups have developed a habit of locating the families of augmented soldiers and going after them.  I’d have to fire a request back to Homeworld to get them to check their records...”

“Start with personnel lost in shuttle crashes,” Mariko said, remembering what Richardson had been doing to the computer files.  “Or could someone have wiped him out of existence completely?”

“I doubt it,” Fitz said.  “All of
those
records are read-only, unless someone has developed a technique that can somehow rewrite sealed crystal records.  Even the later additions only cover the first files – they don’t overwrite them.  No, we’d find our mystery friend somewhere in the files; we’d just have to know him when we saw him.”

Mariko nodded, remembering the pain of her broken wrist.  “How...how could someone who was considered loyal enough to the Imperium to be granted combat augmentation turn on it?”

“All kinds of possibilities,” Fitz said, as he turned away from the body and started to study what little the local station had turned up on the augmented Secessionist.  “Perhaps he was ordered to do something he considered really raw and decided to desert rather than obey orders.  Or perhaps he decided the Secessionists had a point and deserted to offer them his services instead of the Imperium.  Or he might have fallen in love with a woman on a colony world, one of the hundreds trying to get out from under the crushing weight of corporate exploitation and Imperial taxation.  They’ve all happened, over the years.

“Giving people augments is always a gamble.  Some start thinking that they’re superhuman and don’t have to abide by society’s laws any longer.  Others find that they can no longer close their eyes and ears to short-term problems caused by the Imperium.  You need people honest enough with themselves to keep themselves in check, but those people are also the most likely to question orders, particularly when the orders seem to have...unfortunate effects on the local population.  And then they start feeling mutinous.”

He flipped through the file thoughtfully. 

“Prather’s team did a good job,” he said, reluctantly.  The mystery augment had had to go through customs when he landed on Sumter and they’d recorded his fingerprints, every time.  Checking through the records had revealed that he’d come in from a starship that hailed from Paradise, every time.  And, three days after he arrived, he left, heading
back
to Paradise.  “He can’t be going much further, or he would have had no time to keep his schedule with Richardson.”

Mariko followed his line of logic.  “You think there has to be a Secessionist base on Paradise?”

“I think it’s the most likely possibility,” Fitz said.  “Paradise is not known for keeping good records and they pay as little homage to the Imperium as they can get away with.  It will be a good place to continue our investigations.  Prather and his men can finish up here; I’ll see to it that he gets some help from higher authority, once I message home.

“But approaching Paradise will be tricky,” he added.  “The Secessionists might have realised that there is a link between the
Wally West
and the
Bruce Wayne
.  They were interested in the
Wally West
...”

Mariko remembered him commenting on that, back before they’d charged into the building and almost lost their lives.  “Why?”

“A fast courier ship might be very useful if one wanted to coordinate operations across an interstellar scale,” Fitz said.  “Or they might have realised that it was nothing more than a cover identity and there wouldn't be any fallout from Interstellar Couriers.”

He shook his head.  “The only person who could have told us is dead,” he said, nodding at the body on the table.  “An accident...but that doesn't make it any easier to handle.  It will look bad on my record – and Prather’s, of course.  Fratricide is a risk in intelligence operations, but this time it could have cost us badly.”

“Sir,” the doctor said.  “You might want to take a look at this.”

Fitz walked over to the body and peered down at its neck.  “What is it?”

“There's a microscopic tattoo here,” the doctor said.  He pointed a scanner at it and displayed its take on the main screen.  A tiny globe and anchor shimmered into view.  “What is that?”

“An Imperial Marine icon,” Fitz said, grimly.  He looked down at the body, thoughtfully.  “At least we can narrow the search a little.”

“Unless he was a poser,” the doctor pointed out.

“Not with that level of augmentation,” Fitz said.  “You can't get anything like it on the civilian market, even out along the Rim.  That’s why genetic engineering is so popular in the civilian world.  They just can't get the augmentation.”

“So he was a Marine,” Mariko said.  She remembered watching a recruiting film when she’d been thinking about ways to rebel against her parents.  “I thought Marines were incorruptible.”

“I’m sure this one was, too,” Fitz said, bitterly.  “He just saw the crimes committed in the name of the Imperium and couldn’t look away.”

***

Mai surprised Mariko with a hug when they returned to the hotel, even going so far as to throw her arms around Fitz as well.  Fitz took it like a gentleman, managing to disengage himself at the earliest possible opportunity.  Some of Mariko’s ex-boyfriends wouldn't have been so gentlemanly.

“I thought that you were both dead for sure,” she exclaimed, as she helped Mariko out of her worn clothes.  The Imperial Intelligence officers hadn't offered them a change of clothes, which might
either have been a subtle insult, or a recognition that the undeclared agents might need to slip back to the hotel undetected.  “I lost the signal when you went into the intelligence building and I was all set to come after you, but...”