Chapter Seven

Portal Ship

The infiltration subjects have declared the local operation compromised beyond recovery. Do any here object to this classification?

The conclave mulled the report briefly, but none spoke against it.

Very well. Orders have now been initiated to eliminate all traces that might provide a route for the operation to be tracked back to our involvement.

With entropy involved, do any truly believe that they are unaware?

The speaker caused a minor commotion when entering the discussion, but it quickly calmed down.

Of course not, the first speaker responded condescendingly. However, the Alliance are slow to react to all but the most blatant of provocation. They are corrupt and corruptible. It will not be difficult to… encourage them to forgo a direct confrontation.

The conclave agreed with that statement easily enough. The Alliance did not want a conflict with the People and that made them highly amenable to seeking alternate avenues, even when presented with direct evidence of a conflict being inevitable.

This was to their advantage, and it was a factor that the Conclave both planned for and depended on in their ongoing operations against the Enemy.

The irony of it was not lost on even their sensibilities.

Both the People and the Enemy were members of the Alliance. Allies.

It was a joke, of course, as few of the races of the Alliance were truly allied. They banded together specifically because of threats like the People and the Enemy. Existential threats that they believed they could overcome by uniting.

Foolish.

Enemies do not stop being enemies merely because a document claims they do. They merely become more dangerous as they slip beneath the notice of the majority. That was a mistake the People would not make.

The Enemy had to be destroyed.

If it cost every single inhabited world that rested between them, so be it.

End the operation, withdraw the appropriate people through the portal ship in the area and then scuttle it.

*****

Orkhana

Kriss allowed the Colonel to take the lead, watching with thinly disguised interest and amusement as she navigated the facility with an ease that she should not have managed to acquire. He didn’t care what sort of maps she’d seen. It was quite clear, of course, that the woman was hiding information from him. That was fine. He was hiding plenty from her.

They were honest in what mattered.

Both of them would take pleasure in challenging themselves against each other, even if she was less eager about it than he. Both were intent on dismantling the Ross conspiracy that had clearly infiltrated far too deeply into Alliance organization, albeit for their own reasons.

And both knew that if and when the day came, they’d end the other with only a tinge of regret.

For Kriss, that was all he needed to be content with the situation. He doubted Sienele would agree, but spymasters were not warriors for a reason, just as he was not a spymaster for a reason.

Still, it did arouse his curiosity.

“You seem to be quite familiar with the facility and the means of traversing it.”

“I told you,” She said softly…

“Yes, a map,” Kris cut her off. “So you said. You should be less comfortable with your navigation if you want me to believe that you saw a map and now are quite this familiar with the facility.”

“I didn’t see the map,” She said. “I recorded it.”

Kriss was silent for a moment as he considered that. Having a record of the map in the computers he knew she carried, both within her body and in the armor she wore, that would explain much he supposed. He was not entirely certain that he believed it explained it all, but for the moment he would accept the explanation.

“Very well,” he said aloud. “Where are we going then?”

“A currently unused storeroom that has been marked as unusable due to some type of environmental hazard,” The Colonel responded. “I believe that the hazard is likely false.”

“A likely hiding place, are we to take on the conspiracists alone with only our sidearms?” Kriss asked, a hint of his eagerness filtering through to his tone.

“Perhaps,” She sounded amused. He didn’t blame her. “We’ll decide once we’ve seen the forces on site.”

“Of course.”

Kriss noted that they had taken another turn as they spoke, and something about that seemed off, but this time he just let it go. She was keeping her secrets. He was keeping his. At some point he hoped to determine which of them had the more impressive secrets, but he would settle for finding out which had the most impressive martial skill.

*****

Sorilla spoke to Kriss as she moved, but it was difficult for her to manage as she was currently running the Ross map through her accelerometers even as they moved. It was a heady sensation, like the facilities layout was… part of her body?

Proprioception, if she remembered the term correctly. She felt connected to everything in the facility as she moved and could easily point to any given piece of machinery or room with the same automatic reflex as she could if asked to point to her own toes.

She couldn’t manipulate the facility, of course. It was, unfortunately, a passive presentation of the map, but it was an amazing feeling, nonetheless.

The rooms she was navigating them to were as she told Kriss, a series of storerooms that had been sealed off a long while earlier due to a chemical leak. With no real demand for them to be reopened, the Alliance had apparently forgone the cost of cleaning them up, though she had little doubt that there had been some subtle pushes at various levels of the bureaucracy to ensure that happened since she was reasonably certain that the leak never happened in the first place.

It was on the documentation for the facility, but it never once showed up in the four dimensions of the map she was experiencing. The chemical spill just didn’t exist.

Possibly the map was faulty, or she was interpreting it wrong, but Sorilla didn’t think either was true, and so they were on their way… though not through the most direct route, so it would take a little while since she was deliberately avoiding the security feeds. If the infiltrators had gotten deep enough to fabricate a fake chemical spill, she was betting that they’d gotten the feeds as well… and likely much earlier.

She would have.

Really need to get ahold of whatever scanner or software the Ross used to make this map, Sorilla determined.

It was absolutely incredible to experience a location rather than merely observe a depiction of it. If the technology could be adapted for use by SOLCOM, she had no doubt that it would vastly improve combat efficiency, and that was ignoring the obvious applications for pilots and other occupations where such situational awareness was at a premium.

For the moment, though, she was happy to have discovered what she had.

As they got closer to the objective, however, Sorilla slowed and held up a closed fist. Kriss came to a halt automatically, shooting her a questioning look.

“From here forth, we cannot avoid the cameras,” She said simply, opting for the simple truth.

The sharp look he gave her spoke volumes, but she said nothing more and neither did he.

“Very well then” Kriss said with a grin that shifted his entire demeanor. “The fun begins now.”

“Precisely.”

*****

“Commander!”

The Commander paused in his preparations, turning to the aide who had rushed into his office. “What is it?”

“A problem, or precisely, two of them. The unknown alien and one of the Alliance shock troops are approaching.”

“Approaching? Here?” He asked worriedly.

If the enemy knew they were in this location, why send only two combatants? That made no sense at all. A squad would be short handed for this type of operation, two was entirely ludicrously small.

“Yes.”

“Alert all sentries, look for flanking teams,” He ordered. “They wouldn’t send in a pair of operatives for something like this. Find the rest!”

“Yes commander!” The aide rushed out of the office.

The Commander sighed, packing away the last of his personal documentation and closing the case before he crossed the room and plucked a holstered sidearm from where it hung on the wall, strapping the harness to his chest before drawing the weapon and checking its status.

It was lethal and ready so he returned it to the holster before grabbing a combat tunic and stepping out of the room.

“Send a packer to clear my office,” He ordered those in the next room. “I’ll be in the security section.”

“Yes Commander!”

He walked brusquely through the hive of activity. The team had received orders to withdraw and were preparing to do so while leaving the least evidence of their actual activities and presence as possible. Some traces would be impossible to scour, of course, but so long as they left enough confusion it would be fine. The Alliance was a weak polity, most times unable to rouse itself to care about anything because the member races and citizens in general spent most of their time arguing over what they should care about in the first place.

It was a powerful giant, but a slumbering one much of the time, and a stupid and fat one almost for the entire rest. Occasionally, very occasionally, however, the Alliance had shown itself to be capable of more. The giant could fully wake and become aware. That was something he fully intended to prevent if he possibly could.

“Commander in Chambers!”

“Be as you were,” He ordered, ignoring the announcement beyond that simple statement as he walked into the security room.

The feeds were up, the main one focused already on the subjects that brought him there.

The unknown alien was there, walking side by side with one of the Alliance thugs. He believed it was the second in command of the investigation or inspection team.

Interesting.

The unknown had to be well connected for him to be their partner in such an enterprise as this, he realized, but it still made no sense. Even less sense now that he saw that the thug was so highly ranked.

What are they doing?

Beyond the obvious, of course, which was apparently walking right at him and his men as though they had not a single care in the world.

They have to know we’re here, don’t they? Or are they intent on inspecting the ‘chemical spill’?

That… didn’t sound right. It also didn’t matter, aside from providing his men with an element of surprise if it were true. The pair were going to have to be dealt with.

“I want three… no, two security teams in position to ambush them,” He ordered. “All other active teams are to deploy to the periphery and watch for flanking units. Do we have the inspection team under surveillance?”

“Yes Commander,” A security officer pointed to a small display.

The inspection team was indeed still there, all accounted for, and nowhere near the base of operations.

“They must have come with backup we missed,” He decided. “Find them.”

“Yes Commander!”

*****

“You are aware,” Kriss said in a dry tone that rang of amusement to Sorilla’s ears, “That we are violating every procedure in the Sentinels charter? This is clearly an all-hands operation, not one for a two-man strike team.”

“That’s in the Sentinels charter?” Sorilla asked incredulously, turning to look at him, “Really?”

Kriss shrugged, “Lucians were not permitted to write the charter, sadly. It was compiled by five other races as a requirement for our taking up the role we coveted within the Alliance.”

“Ah,” She said, as though that explained everything…

Which, frankly, it did. The Lucian’s, their Sentinels at least, were not the sort to worry overly about rules. They rather enjoyed their jobs too much for that, elevating it to an art form more than a task to be accomplished.

Sorilla understood the mindset a little, but only a little. She had grown fond of her Joan Wayne persona over the years, but if she were honest with herself, she knew it was neither good for mission operations, nor was it exactly healthy for her… mentally or physically.

In any case, that part of her life was almost over.

One way, or the other.

“Well,” She said after a moment’s consideration, “We’re not conducting an assault here, we’re just investigating a section of the facility that is listed as empty. Not our fault if the Administration here was so clearly wrong about that.”

Kriss chuckled, “Indeed. I like that.”

“Somehow I had a feeling you would.”

“Very well, let us… investigate.”

Sorilla nodded, “Let’s.”

*****

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