On The Imperium’s Secret Service (Imperium Cicernus) (36 page)

Mariko nodded.  The Sumter Sector didn't produce very much for itself, beyond food and a handful of basic components, forcing the inhabitants to order their supplies from the inner sectors of the Imperium.  Between the high prices and taxes, it was often cheaper to buy smuggled goods – or items stolen from convoys by pirates.  But a smuggler could hardly run to the law to complain that someone had cheated him on an illegal deal.

“You seem to have thrown money around like water,” Mariko observed, finally.  “Do you think that that won’t attract attention?”

Fitz looked over at her.  “I have a nasty sense that we’re running out of time,” he admitted.  “The Secessionists might just pull in their horns and go underground, or they might just launch their plan ahead of time.  And I still think that their plan, as far as we understand it, is suicide.”

“But they don’t,” Mariko said, quietly.

“They must think that they have a chance to win genuine independence for this sector,” Fitz said.  “Which leads to a single, obvious question: what are we missing?”

He shook his head again.  “Call Mai up to the bridge,” he ordered.  “I’m afraid that she isn't going to be very pleased with
her
part of the plan.”

***

Mai wasn’t. 

“You can't leave me on the
Bruce Wayne
all on my own,” she protested.  “I can come with you to Paradise and I won’t fuck up...”

“I’m not saying that you will,” Fitz said, calmly.  “But I
am
saying that we may need you in position to come charging in to save our lives, again.  And to do that, we need you hiding in the system, waiting for the call.”

“I thought cloaking devices were illegal,” Mai pointed out, snidely.

Fitz managed to look shocked.  “They are?  Details, details.”

He looked at her, seriously.  “I need you to stay in the ship because you’re the most capable of flying her into combat on your own,” he said. 

It was true. Mariko was the better flyer, but Mai could fly at the same time she used the ship’s concealed weapons array against multiple simulated targets. 
Bruce Wayne
could probably take a gunboat, perhaps a destroyer, but anything bigger would probably destroy her if the enemy got a clear shot at her hull. 

“And you did save our lives on Greenland,” Fitz said, in a tone of placation.  “We may need you to do it again.”

Mariko watched Mai stamp off to the other ship, and then looked at Fitz. 

“She’s going to sulk for hours,” she predicted.  “Don’t you want to risk exposing her or something?”

“She has a remarkable engineering talent,” Fitz reminded her.  “I will recommend her to the Imperium’s Engineering Corps, if we live long enough to return to the Core Worlds.  The Imperium just doesn’t have enough trained engineers these days.  You saw the dome on Sumter.”

Mariko nodded.  From what Fitz had said, the entire Imperium was decaying slowly through a lack of maintenance.  The Imperial Navy hadn't built a new capital ship in decades, no new wormhole junctions had been established since Sumter – even though building one out towards the Snakes might have kept them under control. 

Or would it have simply taught them how to make wormholes for themselves
?  Humans were the exclusive owners of wormhole technology, but the laws of science worked the same for every known race.  There was no physical reason why the Snakes couldn't develop wormhole theory for themselves and produce their own networks. 

“I have a question,” she said.  “Why don’t we just train up more engineers?”

“You want a list of problems?”  Fitz snorted. “Let’s see – the teaching establishment these days isn't very good at actually
teaching
, so kids don’t really learn very much.  And then there are security concerns about knowledge spreading to the colonies along the Rim, because they might use it against the Imperium.  And then, kids like to have easy days at school where they just regurgitate what the teachers tell them rather than actually
thinking
about the material.”

He shook his head, bitterly.  “I heard that the ICE actually has to run remedial courses for prospective engineers,” he added.  “Many of the candidates are so useless that they crumple when faced with the actual prospect of having to
think
.  And that takes engineers away from actually maintaining the Imperium....half of our tech is modular because our people don’t have the experience to know how to fix something.  One tiny flaw, and an entire component needs to be discarded.”

Fitz sat down in front of one of the consoles and motioned for her to take the helm.  “Mai,” he said, keying the communications switch, “follow us through phase space, but cloak the moment we return to normal space.  Hold position until we call you.”

“Understood,” Mai’s voice said, tightly.  She definitely didn't sound very happy.  “Call me as soon as you need me.”

Mariko keyed a pre-programmed switch and the
Happy Wanderer’s
phase drive came online.  It was nowhere near as smooth as the
Bruce Wayne’s
drive – they’d had to add additional drive nodes in order to generate a proper phase field – but it felt perfect, almost like coming home.  The inky blackness of phase space yawned open in front of them, sealing the ship off from the rest of the universe. 

But not quite.  One glance at the sensors told her that Mai had followed them into phase space.

“She is a good pilot,” Fitz commented, when Mariko pointed it out.  “And besides, anyone scanning us as we return to normal space is unlikely to notice that two ships came out of phase space, not one.”

Mariko nodded as she stood up.  The five hours they’d spent in interstellar space probably wouldn't be noticed by any watching observer.  Interstellar shipping schedules could never be quite guaranteed by anyone, even the finest ships in the Imperial Navy. 

“It’s two days to Paradise from here,” she said.  “What are we going to do until then?”

“You implied that you wanted to learn how to fight,” Fitz said.  He leered cheerfully at her.  “Or have you changed your mind?”

“But you said that it was impossible for an unaugmented person to beat an augmented person,” Mariko said, crossly.  “I don’t know what to believe any longer.”

“There’s no such thing as an invincible warrior,” Fitz countered.  “Take it from me.  Anyone can be defeated by someone who refuses to panic when under attack.”

***

“You
're
sure
you’re not cheating?”

Mariko ached, almost everywhere.  Even with his implants stepped down – or so he said – Fitz was stronger and faster than Mariko.  The only time she’d come close to beating him was when she’d used the capture web they’d purchased on Marius’s World, and
that
hadn't held him down for long.  It took her several tries to realise that the ex-Marine they’d faced on Sumter had managed to stick him to the floor as well as covering his mouth and nose.

“I’m afraid so,” Fitz said. 

He was sweating too, although she was
sure
that he’d kept the pain dampeners online.  She’d managed to hit him in the chest and that
should
have hurt. 

“Why do you think they make military training so harsh?”He answered his own question a second later.  “Because the training pushes you right to your limit and you learn to cope with little things like fear, panic or chaos.  And you learn to push pain to one side, even without a dampening implant.  I once knew someone who kept firing at rebels even though his legs had been blown off by enemy fire.  And
he
wasn't augmented; he was just a bloody tough soldier.”

Mariko staggered to her feet and glared at him.  “You’re
really
sure you’re not cheating?”

Fitz started to laugh. 

“A few hours of training isn't really enough to turn you into Stellar Star, Heroine of the Space Ways,” he said, dryly. 

Mariko flushed.  She’d devoured that show when she’d been a kid, but later experience had shown that it was all terribly unrealistic.  Stellar Star’s fighting style was absurd, particularly in a tight uniform that showed off a pair of breasts too large to be natural.  And her boyfriend, the loyal but dumb Buck, had had muscles on his muscles. 

“A few weeks might have you mastering some of the basics,” he told her. “Then you could move on to the next few steps.”

Mariko rolled her eyes at him.  “And how long did it take you to learn how to fight?”

“Months, even before I was augmented,” Fitz said.  “I took being in the Guards seriously, you see.  One of the Sergeants was happy to beat the crap out of me every day for six months, until I learned to defend myself.  I was too stubborn to quit.”

“I wish I felt that stubborn,” Mariko said, sourly.  “Right now, all I know for sure is that I don’t want to piss you off.”

They shared a laugh. 

“Get a shower and wipe off the sweat, then get into your shipsuit,” Fitz said.  “We’ll be arriving at Paradise within three hours.”

Mariko nodded dumbly and stumbled down into the ship’s washroom.  After the
Bruce Wayne
, it was almost unpleasant to go back to sonic showers, but
Happy Wanderer
didn't have the space to carry a large water tank, even with recycling.  She stripped down, scowled at her reflection in the mirror, and then stepped into the chamber, allowing the vibrations to push the dirt and sweat off her body.  Water would have felt a great deal better, she realised, and then cursed herself.  Fitz had spoiled them by allowing them to use water on his ship. 

The timer on the bridge had almost counted down to zero when she returned and took the helm console.  At her suggestion, they’d modified their official records to make no mention of Mai – and to imply, if not confirm, that they’d only just purchased the ship at Marius’s World.  Very few in the Imperium would take that on faith, but Paradise simply wouldn't care.  The inhabitants hated the Imperium with a passion that seemed inexplicable, until one looked at their planet.  Few more ill-named planets existed in the Imperium.

“Ten seconds,” she said.  Fitz didn't even look exhausted by the workout, damn him.  “Are you ready?”

“The IFF is online, but I won’t send it until they ping us,” Fitz said.  “We don’t want to catch their attention by being
too
efficient.”

The Imperium’s Survey Service hadn't taken a good look at Paradise, leaving the task of conducting a detailed survey to a contractor who had filed a report claiming that Paradise was...well, a paradise.  No one had bothered to check while the settlement rights were being sold off, eventually being purchased by a loyalist group who were
too
loyal to the Emperor for the Grand Senate’s comfort.  They’d taken sixty thousand people from Homeworld through the wormhole network to Paradise, where they’d discovered – too late – that the contractor had forged the entire report. 

Paradise was a remarkably inhospitable world, complete with poisonous seas, deadly animals and a biology that seemed to repel human crops.  Matters had only been worsened when the first reports were quietly ignored by the Grand Senate, something the new settlers assumed was a deliberate attempt to leave them to die. 

They’d eventually carved out an enclave on Paradise, but in doing so they had openly rejected the entire Imperium.  Paradise played host to smugglers, pirates and even rebels, ignoring the Imperium’s demands that they did something about the rogue elements in orbit around their world.  The lawsuit over the forged settlement certification was still working its way through the courts, and had done so for the last one hundred and eighty years.

Mariko's eyes opened wide as she took in the sheer level of space activity around Paradise.  There were more freighters in orbit than she’d seen anywhere else in the sector, with over five hundred circling the planet or landing on its surface.  The giant ring the locals had built around their planet, a magnificent construction in its own right, played host to hundreds more, all docked in a neat array.  There wasn't anything like it outside the Core Worlds.