Shadow of Victory - eARC

February 1921 Post Diaspora

“I’m a very inventive fellow. With enough time, I can get to anyone.”

—Captain Damien Harahap, Solarian League Gendarmerie

Chapter One

Brandon Grant had no idea how many people he’d killed.

For that matter, he couldn’t recall how many planets he’d killed people on. It wasn’t the sort of thought that crossed his mind. Besides, he’d have needed a pretty sizable folder just to store the data, assuming he’d ever been stupid enough to write it down in the first place.

Still, this was about as far from home as he’d ever operated, and he wondered—vaguely—why these particular kills were so important. And why this one had to look like a common mugging gone wrong. The other one had been much more straightforward, and she’d been a far more prominent target to begin with, but the employer’s local agent hadn’t quibbled about the obvious ambush his second team had arranged for her. It was true that she was rather more visible than Grant’s current target, since she worked in uniform and operated openly out of Gendarmerie HQ here in Pine Mountain, whereas the man he was about to kill didn’t. If things worked right, any investigators would buy the announcement from the McIntosh Popular Front claiming responsibility for the first hit, although the MPF was going to be astounded to hear about it. So why not let the same “murderous terrorists” deal with this guy, as well? Maybe they just didn’t want two obvious assassinations taking off people who had a close professional link? But that struck him as pretty silly. If they died so close together—within less than two hours of each other, for God’s sake!—it was still going to ring alarm bells for anyone inclined to be suspicious in the first case. Or maybe this guy’s cover was so deep that no one else would know he was connected to the Gendarmerie at all, far less to his uniformed associate?

He shrugged mentally at the thought. He was accustomed to making targeted murder look like something else whenever needed, and his employer’s reasons for wanting someone dead were none of his business. If this was the way the people paying the freight wanted it, this was how he’d do it, but it would have been so much simpler to simply walk up behind the target, shoot him in the back of the head, and keep right on walking. It was amazing how easy that was, even with all the modern surveillance and security systems in play, if one simply thought ahead a bit and kept his nerve. But, no. This one couldn’t be an obvious hit, for whatever reason. A scrap of an ancient poem wandered through his mind, and he snorted in amusement. It truly wasn’t his “to wonder why.” In point of fact, his employer paid him extraordinarily well not to wonder, but simply “to do or die.”

Of course, in Grant’s case, he did the doing and someone else did the dying.

He kept his eyes on his uni-link display’s current pornographic feature, smiling faintly as he recalled the distasteful looks that feature had drawn from the handful of passersby who’d happened to glance at it. He didn’t really blame them; it was as energetic—and loud—as it was in bad taste. That was why he’d chosen it and disabled the privacy function to make sure it could be seen and heard by anyone unfortunate enough to enter his orbit. Anyone dressed like him, leaning against a wall and watching that sort of “entertainment” might be many things, but he certainly wasn’t one of the best paid assassins of the explored galaxy.

He did glance up—once—to check the positions of his team, although he was confident they were where they were supposed to be. He’d brought two of them—Markus Bochart and Franz Gillespie—from Old Earth when his employer deployed them to the Madras Sector. They’d worked with him several times before, and he knew he could count on their expertise. The other two were local recruits, but they’d worked out well so far. In fact, he rather regretted the fact that he’d have to eliminate them as one last housekeeping chore before he left the sector. Good help could be hard to find, yet he was unlikely to be operating out this way again anytime soon, and his employer, who liked loose ends even less than he did, had been very specific about that.

All four of them were in position, dressed—like him—in cheap, gaudy clothes in the orange, black, and green colors of the Tremont Towers Dragons, one of Pine Mountain’s less fastidious street gangs. That was a minor risk, since the Dragons were less than popular with the local authorities for a host of good reasons, and it was always possible the five of them would draw the attention of the Pine Mountain Police. That was unlikely as long as they simply floated the street, however. Here in the sector capital officers had more important things to do than move along loiterers—even members of the TTD—unless those loiterers made a nuisance of themselves. Besides, it would actually help if some cop had made note of their presence and recalled it later. It would help steer any inquiries in the proper direction, and he hid a smile as he considered how energetically the Dragons were likely to find themselves interrogated if their target was truly important enough to justify all this elaborate deniability rigmarole.

A soft chime sounded in his earbug.

He kept his eyes on the uni-link for another ten seconds, then keyed it off, and shoved himself away from the wall he’d been so assiduously propping up for the last hour or so. He stretched, made deliberate—and obvious—eye contact with his henchmen, and then ambled away up the sidewalk. He smiled as Bochart pried himself away from the light standard he’d been holding up and paused to make a mock grab at a passing pedestrian’s shoulder bag, then laughed mockingly as she snatched it protectively away. It was a nice touch, one that the local surveillance cameras must have caught but obviously not a serious attempted robbery which might have prompted an immediate response. When the chip was examined later, though, it would show that the “Dragons” had been in a mood to make trouble before they encountered the unfortunate victim of the mugging-to-be.

Ahead of him, the soon-to-be-dead-man came around the corner and started down the block, and Grant’s predator eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

The most extraordinary thing about the man coming towards them was how outstandingly ordinary he looked. Medium height, medium build, medium complexion, medium brown hair…there was absolutely nothing about him to catch someone’s attention or attract anyone’s notice or cause even the most suspicious to file him away in memory. Indeed, he was even more ordinary looking than he’d seemed in the imagery Grant had studied when the assignment landed in his inbox. People didn’t get that ordinary without working at it—hard—as Brandon Grant knew better than most, and he’d warned his assistants against automatically accepting the inoffensive harmlessness the other man projected so skillfully.

* * *

Damien Harahap was an unhappy man.

Partly that was because he disliked failure, no matter who might have employed him at the moment, and failures didn’t come much more spectacular than the ones he’d enjoyed on the planets of Montana and Kornati. He didn’t know—and might never know—exactly how the wheels had come off, but the news out of the Talbott Sector made it abundantly clear they had. Something had certainly inspired a Manticoran captain to take a scratch-built squadron to Monica and trash the entire system, despite the distinct possibility that his actions would provoke a shooting incident with the Solarian League Navy. Right off the top of his head, Harahap couldn’t think of many reasons for a sane human being to do anything of the sort. In fact, the one that came most readily to mind was the discovery that somebody had been providing the Monica System Navy with first-line Solarian warships at the same time somebody else had been fueling and feeding terrorist movements designed to destabilize local governments which were in the process of seeking admission to the Star Kingdom of Manticore in places like Montana and Split. Only a complete idiot would have assumed there was no connection between those two happenstances, and there were very few complete idiots in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The RMN wasn’t exactly noted for timidity, either, and Harahap could understand how a Manticoran officer might feel a tad…irked by something like that.

The problem it posed for him was whether or not the Manties would be able to track his handiwork back to the Solarian League Gendarmerie. Not that the Gendarmerie had had anything to do with it…officially. Unfortunately, Dennis Harahap was a captain in the Gendarmerie, and Manticore might find it a bit difficult to believe he’d been operating independently. Especially since he hadn’t been, however carefully Ulrike Eichbauer had stressed the fact that he was being given “leave time” in order to assist his current private enterprise employers on his own centicredit.

Which was another reason for his current unhappiness. Major Eichbauer understood plausible deniability as well as the next covert operator, but she was the one who’d sent him the coded request to meet her at Urrezko Koilara. He’d half expected the summons, knowing Eichbauer. She wasn’t the sort to leave one of her people twisting in the wind, but she was also unlikely to call him in for any sort of official meeting until she knew whether or not his recent activities were going to splatter all over the Gendarmerie. Urrezko Koilara was a small, out-of-the way restaurant specializing in Old Earth’s Iberian cuisine. It wasn’t going to be found on any gourmand’s guide to the galaxy, but the food was on the high side of decent and its owner had been one of Eichbauer’s best confidential informants before her promotion to major took her off the streets and into an office job. Which made it an ideal place for a quiet, off-the-books meet.

But Eichbauer hadn’t been there. Worse, the owner hadn’t even glanced in Harahap’s direction when he arrived. Either no one had told her Eichbauer intended to meet one of her people in her restaurant, or else someone had paid her to pretend no one had. Given the faint frown of baffled memory the woman had bestowed upon him when he asked to speak to the manager and complimented her on the quality of the food, Harahap was inclined towards the former explanation. If the supposed meeting had been some sort of set up, she would have greeted him with bland innocence, not with the expression of someone trying to remember where she’d seen him before. He was accustomed to not being remembered, since it was one of his primary stocks in trade, but some trace of memory had obviously been working in there, and there wouldn’t have been if she’d been briefed in preparation for some kind of operation.

So what had happened to Eichbauer? She knew how to get in touch with him to cancel the meet, and she hadn’t. But he was positive the original message had come from her; among other things, no one else knew the code phrase, since he’d selected it randomly himself better than three T-years ago. It was remotely possible she’d decided he needed to be tidied up before any more fecal matter hit the rotary air impeller, but there were a dozen other ways she could have gone about that. Besides, if she’d wanted him removed from the equation, there would have been someone waiting for him at the restaurant. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine what could have prevented a Gendarmerie major—and Brigadier Francisco Yucel’s chief intelligence officer, at that!—from keeping an appointment she’d made.

It was all very worrisome, although no one could have guessed that from his carefree expression as he enjoyed the early afternoon sunlight. There had to be an explanation. The problem was that it could very well be an explanation for which he didn’t much care, and those sorts of explanations could be…messy.

* * *

Brandon Grant’s two local employees sauntered past the oncoming target without, Grant noted approvingly, giving him so much as a glance. They were behind him, now, and Markus Bochart opened the gambit by stepping into the target’s path with exactly the right ganger swagger. His left hand rose, three middle fingers bladed together for a contemptuous thrust to the target’s sternum, while his right hand slid inside his own unsealed jacket.

It was so satisfying when everything went according to plan, Grant thought. In another three seconds…

“Hey, null jet! Let’s see your wal—”

* * *

Although he might be a Gendarmerie captain, Harahap’s assignments had always kept him well clear of the Madras Sector’s capital planet. His weren’t the sort of talents which would have been found their best and highest use on a planet like Meyers or in a city like Pine Mountain, and anonymity was one of his most important stocks in trade. That was one of the reasons Eichbauer had been careful to keep him buried in the boonies and as far out of any potential public spotlights as possible.

As a result, he was less familiar with the capital’s gangs than he might have been somewhere else, but he recognized ganger colors when he saw them. Nothing had screamed overt warning to him, but the ingrained situational awareness born of thirty years of fieldwork had kept an eye on the quintet sauntering arrogantly toward him. He’d noticed peripherally when the first two stepped past him, and he knew exactly where they were. It was the trio still coming towards him that held his attention, however. There was something just a little off about them, something he couldn’t have quite put a finger on if anyone had asked him to describe it.

Under other circumstances, he would have donned his nervous-mouse citizen’s mask and stepped back timidly when the arrogant tough jabbed him in the chest. He would even have brought out the extra wallet he carried specifically to hand over to demanding police officers and surrendered it with proper, cringing terror. But the other hand—the one sliding inside the loose jacket—rang all sorts of alarms.

“Hey, null jet!” the ganger snarled scornfully. “Let’s see your wal—”

* * *

Brandon Grant’s eyes widened as the target’s right arm flashed out with serpent quickness. It darted inside Bochart’s left arm, slammed into the inside of his forearm, and swept the entire arm out and to the side. Then it snaked around and its hand locked on the inside of Bochart’s elbow. A sudden twist, and Bochart grimaced in anguish, his knees trying to buckle with the sudden, totally unexpected pain as the steely fingers drilling into his elbow found exactly the nerve points they’d sought.

But Markus Bochart was a professional. The pain didn’t keep his right hand from finding the haft of the vibro blade scabbarded under his jacket. The plan hadn’t called for it to come out so quickly—not until the belligerent ganger’s temper had exploded when his victim proved insufficiently pliant. He didn’t much care about plans at the moment, though. The speed and brutal efficiency of his victim’s response told him that despite Grant’s admonition, their target’s unprepossessing appearance had lulled him into a grievous misjudgment.