The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (28 page)

After a while, Anna put herself back together, and staring absently across the room, she said, “I can’t believe this is happening, Jack.”

“I can’t either. They prepared to win. We didn’t.”

“Some part of me wants to say it really can’t be that bad. That somehow good is going to triumph. I keep waiting to wake up from the nightmare.”

“I don’t think we’re going to wake up from this, Anna.”

“I know.”

“But I don’t think that means good won’t win in the end. If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that you can’t run from the darkness. You have to go through it. You have to face the pain and let it wash over you. Doing anything else only makes it worse.”

For a few seconds they were silent together, each contemplating a future in which the Unity Corporation ran the whole of the galaxy.

Then Jack squeezed her tighter. “Wherever we go, Anna, whatever happens, I promise I will go there with you. I lost you once. I won’t let us be separated again.”

Anna forced herself to be present in this moment of safety. Internally, she focused her attention on her emotions allowing them to unclench in safety of Jack’s arms. When she had first met Jack, she had been a naive, codependent fool to believe a relationship with an ass like him would come to anything other than a bad end. How had he changed? How did he get here? Why had he changed? For her?

“Why did you stick with me, Anna?”

Anna laughed. “I was just wondering the same thing. To tell you the truth, probably not for good reasons. It seems pretty foolish, looking back on it.”

Jack laughed with her. “Yes, it does.”

Anna sat up and looked at him as his face wrinkled into a grimace.

“I was such an ass.”

Anna shrugged. “You had a lot to overcome, Jack. I think you’re one of the most tenacious people I know, and you’re here with me now.” She leaned in and teased his lips with her own. Then she whispered in his ear, “If we weren’t at work, I’d rip your clothes off, Jack Halloway.”

He smiled. “Patience, my dear,” he said, even as he gently ran his hands over her ass. “The slow buzz can be nice, if you work with it.”

Anna stood up, looking for something to distract her from the rush of hormones coursing through her veins. Contrary to popular mythology, age certainly hadn’t done anything to dampen her enthusiasm. If anything, the quality of her relationship with Jack had only increased it.

She looked at the video Jack was watching. “What’s this?”

“That, my dear, is something old. It was recorded by the Welsh resistance a week after the start of the war. If the resistance is to be believed, and there is no reason to doubt them, you are looking at the person who is single-handedly responsible for blowing up the Wales gate control station and keeping Wales in Allied hands for another five days.”

“Who is she?”

“
She’s Captain Audra Taylor of the Brunswick Gate Command Authority
, and she was the commander on duty when the war started. In fact, the very first shots may have been fired in her control center.”

“How did you get this?”

“A courier smuggled it out of Wales about three weeks after it was recorded. It’s slowly been making its way across the galaxy to us ever since.”

Incredulous, Anna asked, “They couldn’t have gotten it here sooner? Maybe used an EP communications system?”

“It explains so much about how the Allies think, doesn’t it? Some of their systems get compromised, and they panic. To be fair, the Welsh were just getting organized. They hadn’t really had a chance to set things up yet. It would have gotten here much faster had the recording been made recently.”

Jack continued. “Do you want to see it?”

“Yes, please,” Anna said with enthusiasm.

Jack backed the video up to the beginning.

A voice off-screen said, “Can you tell us what happened on the morning of April 13th?”

Taylor nodded and moved her tongue around in her mouth. She looked as if it were painful to speak. “On that morning, I started my shift as usual. Everything seemed to be normal until Hartman, that is, my husband, called and told me of the attack on the Allied economic conference. I had just ended my call with him when Andre Toby, or rather someone who looked like Andre Toby, opened fire in my control center…”

Anna’s heart skipped a beat. “Who did she she say had fired in her control center?”

Jack reached down and paused the vid. “Someone named Andre Toby.”

“He’s one of my missing persons.”

“Really?”

“Until now, Andre Toby was the sole known survivor from the gate control station in New Wales. He was rescued from a life pod by Allied Fleet Number Two while they were fighting to retain control of the gate. He was on board the Solus when she fought her way out of the gate later that week with the remains of the fleet. When they arrived in San Pedro for repairs, he never reported in with the Brunswick authorities for reassignment.”

Since the death of King Nicholas, Anna’s role had changed dramatically. The new King wasn’t as interested in having the personal representative of the Empress looking over his shoulder. Besides, once the war started, diplomacy between the Allied heads of state, or what was left of them, hadn’t needed to be secretive. The Empress no longer stayed above the fray and came out openly in support of the Allies.

Anna had been given a low-level job in counter-intelligence with the Ministry of Information. Since the start of the war, there had been a number of unexplained disappearances and murders in the fleet. Anna had been given the task of figuring out who was behind them. It was really police work and not Anna’s area of expertise. Jack figured the task was meant to give her something to do while the important people got on with the real task of winning the war.

“Well, if Audra Taylor is telling the truth, Andre Toby was dead before the war even started. Toby was some Unity agent named Summers in disguise.”

That startled Anna. “Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

Anna stepped over to the wall next to where Jack watched the 2D and used her heads-up to bring up her diagram of the missing persons and murders in the fleet. “I’ve had this vague suspicion that a lot of these weren’t accidents or random. For one thing, those killed seemed, in general, to increase in rank over time.” Anna stepped away from the wall, gesturing with her hands to bring a hologram of her work into three-dimensional space.

She caught Jack grinning at her.

“What?”

“You would have been good at the black market on Aetna. It was all about pattern recognition.”

“Who says I wasn’t good at it on Sicily Four? I had to kiss ass with my suppliers, you know. If you wanted the best food for your market, a fifth of generic, synthetic scotch could get you places.”

Jack laughed. “You’ve never told me about that.”

Anna raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never asked. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but then I’ll have to kill you.”

She smiled and turned back to her diagram. “Then there are things like this.” She gestured to highlight one section. “Captain Marcus Downs was found dead by his landlord at around fifteen hundred Imperial Standard Time, but one of his military buddies swears he saw him ducking into a restroom in a shuttle station about an hour later. He wanted to talk to him, so he waited outside. Downs never came out. When his buddy went into the restroom, he wasn’t there. I have at least six of these where the body is found and someone says they saw the victim afterwards. Another funny thing, all the victims are males of approximately the same height and build. In fact, Toby was probably the most overweight victim of them all. Otherwise, the MO tends to be healthy, fit, and around five-foot-ten, give or take an inch or two.”

While Anna had been talking, Jack had been looking at her data. Unexpectedly, he started highlighting individuals. For a couple of minutes, Anna remained silent and let him work. Then she asked, “Whatever happened to Captain Taylor?”

Jack stopped and looked at her. “She disappeared right after her interview. No one has seen her since.”

Anna’s stomach clenched. “Captured?”

“Maybe, but her husband and two children went missing right around the same time. They’re both ex-Special Forces for Brunswick. I think she went on the run. My secretary back on Aetna did that right after Randall arrived. Things started getting hot, and her husband took a job somewhere far away, near the Jersey frontier. She put herself on vacation for two weeks, and they bolted. I’ve always wondered what happened to her. I hope she got away.”

Anna smiled and kissed Jack on the cheek as he leaned on the work table under where he was manipulating Anna’s information. “You’re such an optimist these days. Where’s the hardened, bitter cynic I used to hate?”

Jack smiled as he continued to work.

Anna leaned on his shoulder.

He sat up. “Look.” He pointed to what he’d been doing.

Anna gasped.

“Andre Toby didn’t disappear when the second fleet reached San Pedro. He was already dead. Summers killed him, and then he killed a pilot named Captain Owens on Solus and took his identity, but he didn’t stop there.”

Anna followed the trail of Jack’s work, making sense of the chaos and finding in it a pattern which she had failed to see. For the last six months, Summers had moved through the Allied forces with ease. Where the trail ended staggered her. “We have to see the King.”

Jack nodded. “I think you’re right.”

Elijah Summers sat in a cafe on Pontus, sipping a decaffeinated cappuccino. He sat outside absorbing the bright sunshine of Pontus’ main series star. The climate in the planetary capital, Tourgout, suited him nicely. It reminded him of summer near his home on the eastern seaboard of North America, humid and warm.

His next mark sat across the way reading his mail on his heads-up. Summers recognized that he had been unusually cautious about his mark this time, spending more time learning his mannerisms and preferences.

For the last few months, he had been doing deep-cover cyber-warfare—opening vulnerabilities, attacking ships, and sabotaging units from inside the Allied military itself. He had been body-hopping, always keeping one step ahead of the investigation, leaving behind a seemingly random trail of disappearances. Only once had his plans been thwarted, and that took place right at the beginning of the war. In reality, the disaster with Captain Audra Taylor hadn’t mattered. It had only delayed him a little. Overall, it had been an all-too-easy assignment. Summers smiled as he thought,
Now if the Allies ever managed to promote effective commanders like Taylor, it might have been a different story.

Recently, however, his mission had changed. When he deemed the time right, Timothy Randall had come calling again. Katana had been given a challenge.

He let out a slow breath, just as the melancholy Athenian Colonel, whose identity he inhabited, would have. The Colonel had been moody. Most of those whose identities he’d stolen in the months since the war began had been moody. The Colonel had been more moody than most. The number one characteristic which Summers looked for when he chose an identity to steal was isolation, particularly in meatspace. A slightly misanthropic personality seemed to go with isolation.

It wasn’t hard to find, either. In a society where ninety percent of all waking hours were spent interacting with some sort of electronic device, social isolation was, in many ways, the norm, rather than an oddity. It often expressed itself in behaviors like those exhibited by Captain Jeremy Holland of the Pontus Home Guard, who had checked his messages on his heads-up device three times in the last minute.

Summers took another sip of his drink and wondered again why anyone would consume something so vile.
And not even any caffeine to redeem it, either
, he thought.
What a waste.

He refocused on his next mark. Summers figured it was going to get irritating to have to check his heads-up that often. He didn’t like that thought.

The mark had an appointment scheduled with his dentist in twenty minutes. The walk would take him at least that long, if not slightly longer. He should have left by now, but Holland always ran late for everything, except his work. When it came to his job, Holland performed at a constantly high level. He had to.

The mark stood up to leave, threw the barista an electronic tip with the heads-up, and stepped out the door.

It’s time
, thought Summers. He accessed intraspace, watching himself and the mark from above as they walked in real time through the streets of Tourgout. As expected, the mark took a hard left as he walked across the cobblestones of the main square near the Sadarian fountain. Summers walked on, taking the next street.

The street Holland chose was much narrower than the one he had exited. Summers paralleled him in the alley next door. This was the tricky part of the operation. He worked hard to time his steps perfectly. Using the aerial view provided by the satellite overhead, Summers checked the intersection where he would cross paths with Holland again. Internally, he smiled to himself. It was nearly empty. No one was behind Holland, and the two women ahead of him were nearly thirty yards away and had no idea he walked behind them.

Summers stepped out of the narrow alley, just as Holland walked by. He stumbled drunkenly, bumping into Holland and grabbing him around the neck. The needle which erupted from the tip of his left middle finger injected the toxin directly into the carotid artery. Death was almost instantaneous. Holland suddenly leaned on Summers but continued to walk.

“There you are, my old friend,” Summers said drunkenly. He hid his face by looking at the ground. He guided the still ambulatory dead man into the alley. They stumbled along until they arrived at the door which Summers had selected earlier. He palmed the lock. The handprint matched the one assigned, and it clicked open. Once inside, Summers used his link with the satellite to feed back to the servers a false video which showed him and Holland continuing on their merry way.

Summers stumbled inside to the small, warehouse-like, business space he had rented for this purpose. He had paid three months rent up front. The absentee landlord lived halfway across the planet. He wouldn’t think about it again until Summers missed his next payment, and he would be long gone by then.