Authors: Bennett R. Coles
“I think we should make our way toward the displays,” she said. “Most of the VIPs are trying for the dramatic backdrop.”
Chuck smiled at Thomas as she pushed off into the crowd, headed for the dark, looming shape of the black fast-attack craft.
“Looks like you have your hands full, Thomas,” he commented. They started after her through the clumps of chatting people, his cameraman following obediently behind. Thomas tried to keep sight of his tiny wife, ignoring the urge to look out for a tiny blonde in an Astral uniform.
“You have no idea, Chuck.”
It was late when his rented apartment finally came into sight, and Kete Obadele rubbed his hands across his eyes. The movement didn’t go unnoticed.
“The camera implant must really take its toll, Kit,” Chuck Merriman said from the driver’s seat. “Is your head ready to explode?”
Kete didn’t feel the slightest discomfort from the “camera implant”—as a minor subroutine in his overall sensor suite, the visual recorder was almost an afterthought.
The bulk of his mental energy was currently devoted to sorting for later analysis the terabytes of data he’d recorded throughout the gala, accessed via the Terran security sensors. The sheer numbers were giving him ample opportunity to start building a framework theory on how they interacted with one another. It was a tiny first step.
“You get used to it,” he replied with a tired smile, “but sometimes I’m so beat I forget to shut it down. That can make for some embarrassing footage.”
Chuck laughed and shook his head. “You’ll never see me putting computers inside my brain. That’s what I have a network for.”
The car drifted silently to a stop outside Kete’s building. Shops at ground level supported two stories of apartments above. Glass and plastic, the exterior was modern but unremarkable. Little traffic disturbed the quiet street at this hour, and the only thing Kete heard as he stepped out into the warm, dry air was the distant pulse of a sky shuttle. He looked around casually, scanning for anything unusual, then tucked his head back down through the open car door.
“Thanks for the ride, Chuck,” he said. “I’ll get the visuals uploaded before morning.”
“No worries. I’m just glad the network actually assigned me a dedicated cameraman. I really appreciate you helping me out with this project. I figure it’s pretty dull compared to your usual assignments.”
Kete gave a friendly laugh. “Sometimes dull is good, my friend—and how can I say no to your boss?”
“If you ever figure it out, let me know.” The reporter grinned and gently closed the door. Kete waved and turned toward his building as the silent car moved off down the street.
The paved street. He took a moment to stare at such a Terran artifact. These people had given up wheels on private vehicles more than a hundred years ago. Why they insisted on still blackening their cities with ribbons of crushed rock and poison was just one of the many mysteries to him. An ubiquitous feature few Earthlings ever noticed, to Kete the paved street was one of the most obvious symbols of this culture’s ignorant worship of tradition over reality, of pride over prudence.
The common Centauri opinion was that there were Terrans actively trying to destroy the Earth, but he’d spent enough time on this world now to know that most Terrans didn’t give it much thought beyond what the State told them to think.
He ascended the outside stairs to the second floor and palm-swiped his lock. His landlord had been surprised when Kete didn’t want the usual optical security system, but Kete quickly explained that he was an optically augmented journalist. That had satisfied any objections. Terrans, he knew, generally didn’t ask too many questions if you could make your first answer both plausible and slightly exotic.
His apartment was furnished with all the style expected of a man of Kit Moro’s wealth, though there was nothing on display that could be called a personal item. As Kete sat down and unlocked the shielded case kept snug underneath the opaque desk table, he felt a moment of pity for Terrans and their requirement to store their memories on external devices.
Still, as a home base this apartment was more than adequate, and it was an excellent place to hide in plain sight. He hoped the other agents were comfortable as well. Eventually, though, he would need to find a more suitable location for the endgame. He had enough respect for the Terran counter-intelligence services, and particularly their ultra-secret Astral Special Forces, to know that complacency on this mission would mean a quick death.
He checked for messages, and only one waited for him, a cryptic verse from his colleague, Valeria Moretti. He smiled, immediately understanding the hidden meaning of her poem. The portable jump gate had been delivered to the drop point. He marveled at her ability to add her own form of low-grade code, in rhyming couplets no less, to the already impenetrable Centauri security systems.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about the mission that portable jump gate would support, though. Jump gates were massive, deep-space constructs funded by major government projects—and now Centauria expected him to just create a new one? That mission was thankfully still weeks away. He needed to get some clarity on it.
As he started the upload of this evening’s espionage to the Centauri datalink, he summoned images of Rupa and their daughters from the mountain vacation they had taken last year. The girls’ shining faces as they played in snow for the first time was a sight that would forever bring a smile to his face. Rupa had been more content to stand on the path, bundled in her long coat and heavy boots, but even she had joined in the inevitable snowball fight. What an arm she’d had! Kete could still almost feel the icy meltwater trickling down the back of his coat.
A sudden mental silence alerted him to the fact that the upload was complete. He resealed the case and purged his own storage net. If he was ever discovered, it was wise not to give the Terrans any idea of what he’d been accumulating. For all their society’s backwardness regarding implants, Terran intelligence forces were remarkably adept at deconstructing even a well-defended Centauri mind.
He leaned back in the only comfortable chair in the apartment, and sighed. It had been an exhausting day capping a string of exhausting days. When he’d been called to become Chuck Merriman’s cameraman, it had hardly been a surprise. It seemed the previous cameraman had “stopped returning calls,” and was nowhere to be found.
Tonight’s gala had been the first big test of his synthetically augmented identity chip, and the fact that Kete was still free and alive spoke to the effectiveness of his efforts.
Images of Rupa and the girls still played through his mind, and he indulged for just a moment as his eyes slid closed. Those were happy times, but as he flipped through the recorded pictures, he sensed other images seeping into his mind, like tendrils of smoke. Just wisps at first, hints that grew to envelop his carefully controlled memory access.
Flashes outshone his pictures, and the heavy coat on Rupa faded to that simple, comfortable outfit she’d been wearing that hellish night. The smiles on the girls’ faces began to stretch, morphing into screams as memory gave way to nightmare.
“No!”
He opened his eyes and stared around the room, grounding himself in reality. Memory access channels began shutting down automatically, following his pre-set responses alert to dangerous infiltration. Still he was tired, and it was hard to seal all the gaps. The smoke of memory seeped in, and despite all his training, all his discipline as an agent of the Centauri government, he felt his mind slowly, inexorably slipping back…
* * *
“Daddy, Daddy! The stars are falling from heaven!”
Kete kept his eyes on the v-ware screen projected at his work station, irritated that his train of thought had been interrupted. He’d promised the girls that he’d come and play as soon as he was finished. Didn’t they understand that these interruptions only slowed him down?
“That’s great, honey,” he called. “Try and catch some for me.”
Olivia—at least, he thought it was Olivia—shouted something back in her usual, excited manner. He was vaguely aware of the thumping of little feet headed out to the deck, but his attention remained on the analysis in front of him.
Reports from the front lines indicated that at least half the Terran fleet was still in port, with perhaps two star forces worth of ships being readied for departure. The combined Centauri-Procyoni squadrons had repelled the latest Terran assault on the jump gates, and the mighty Astral Base Five was effectively out of the fight. Most of the Terran forces scattered through the colonies had been destroyed, but some forces were still unaccounted for, most notably the remains of the expeditionary force in Sirius.
Finding the missing Terran warships wasn’t the highest priority, as long as the jump gate accesses were held by friendly forces. Yet it was still Kete’s job to find them, and he was determined to help his government tie up that particular loose end while the generals and admirals planned the main assault into Terran space.
Letting his thoughts soar free, he looked and listened for hints that might point the way to the rogue Terran ships. Errant radio signals, unusual bends in spacetime, even subtle shifts in temperature within the Sirian solar system might be enough. He loosed general queries, listened to what drifted back. It was work that required patience, and stillness of mind.
“Daddy! Come and look!”
Kete sighed in frustration. Checking the time, he realized that the girls were already up past their bedtime. Perhaps the war effort could take second place to his family, at least for a short while. He withdrew from the Cloud, locked his secure terminal, and rose from his chair.
It was a short walk through the dining room to the open doors leading out to the deck, and he saw both girls in pajamas, leaning against the railing and staring upward. Rupa was next to them and was looking out toward the night sky with equal rapture. She heard him coming and motioned with interest for him to join them.
The night air was cool. It had lost the crispness of winter, but Kete still shivered slightly in his t-shirt and jeans. He put his arm around Rupa’s shoulders and gently pulled her against him, resting his other hand on Olivia’s head.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Look, Daddy!” little Jess cried, pointing all across the southern sky. “Look at the stars!”
At first all he saw were the familiar, twinkling points in the sky, some obscured by the scattered clouds common at this time of year. Then slowly he began to notice motion, like low-orbit ships, but moving very fast. Bolts of light lashed out from these moving stars, occasionally resulting in a sudden flare as bolts met new stars. It was a silent dance of light far above them, and he stood as riveted as his family.
Then, as his gaze drifted down toward the horizon, he saw that some of the stars were moving together. He blinked, wondering if he’d been staring into the electronic ether for too long. No, a large group of tiny stars were moving slowly in the sky, their lengthening tails very low against the dark surface of the world. He held Rupa just a little closer, quickly counting perhaps fifty shooting stars in the tight cluster.
Then a flash tore his eyes away from the distant sight. An orange meteor streaked down from the southern sky, smashing into the valley that stretched away from their ridge-top home. It came so fast and with such silence that Kete for a moment doubted it was real, and then the first explosion ripped upward from the ground. It occurred in a major industrial park, he realized—and then, seconds later, the thunderous fury of sound swept over them like a tidal wave.
Kete instinctively ducked and pulled Rupa down with him. The girls screamed and cowered against the deck. Meteors began to rain from the sky, streaking silently ahead of their colossal sound waves as they burned through the atmosphere to pound down on the industrial park and its surrounding blocks. New bolts of energy began to fire upward from the landscape, but even Kete could tell that they were firing in a blind panic. The relentless bombardment of the industrial park, by contrast, revealed a deadly precision that made Kete’s heart go cold.
The bombardment stopped suddenly, but he had already guessed that no reprieve would be coming. The large formation of shooting stars he’d seen on the horizon had faded from view, but in the chaotic light of the burning industrial park he saw the glints of flight and movement. He activated his visual recorder and strained to maximum zoom. Even from his distance of nearly ten kilometers he recognized the dark, boxy forms of Terran drop ships.
“Oh, no, no, no…”
Rupa rose to her knees and clung to his shoulder.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
Kete slowly tore his eyes away from the horror he could see on the dark plain below, shutting down his visual augments to look at his wife with his natural eyes. The worry in her gaze turned to raw fear as she saw in him the emotion he was unable to suppress. He’d been an agent of the government for twenty years, had seen the worst of humanity across the star systems, but he’d never imagined that it would come to this.
He’d never imagined it would come here.
“Take the girls,” he said, rising to his feet and pulling her up with him. “Get down in the basement and stay there. Don’t open the door for anyone except me.”
Rupa didn’t move. Her mouth hung open in shock. Kete looked again at the valley, saw new flashes of light in and around the industrial park as the Terran troopers fought their way outward onto his home soil. Centauri home soil.
He looked in desperation at his wife. At his precious, innocent daughters. He knew what Terran troops were capable of doing. Olivia and Jess stared up at him in shock, tears trickling down their cheeks. Rupa touched his arm.
“Kete, what’s happening?”
He leaned in to her, pointing down toward what he now realized was the Terran landing zone.
“Terra is here,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “I don’t know how, but they’re here. Their troops are on the ground, and probably headed this way.” He scooped up Jess, handed her to Rupa and then hefted Olivia into his own arms. “Get to the basement and stay down there. Things are going to get very dangerous up at street level.”