Prologue
Sorilla hit the ground, sliding feet first under the burst of pulse fire that twisted spacetime overhead. Her metalstorm pistols snarled on automatic targeting, taking two targets down while she focused on the third and snapped her feet across his legs, chopping the big guy down like a lumberjack felling a tall oak.
He barely had time to grunt in pain before she chopped him hard across the skull with her armored elbow, using the force to propel herself back up to one knee as she skidded to a full stop and slowly swept the room.
“Control room, clear.”
“Enemies in the corridors are eliminated,” Kriss said over the radio a moment later.
Sorilla began to wind down slowly as she heard the rest of the Lucian team chiming in with similar messages.
Finally, Kriss came back again, “The target has been secured.”
“I am entering the fighting zone,” Sienele’s voice came along a moment later.
Sorilla was on her feet when the pair made their way into the control room. Kriss noted the bodies and nodded respectfully, but Sienele focused on the machines they’d been fighting to protect.
“Are the computers undamaged?” He asked intently.
Sorilla nodded, holstering her twin pistols. “My weapons were set to auto-target enemies only. No collateral.”
“Excellent,” Sienele shot an amused look at Kriss, “Certain members of the Alliance might want to consider such… subtleties.”
Kriss snorted, “Where would the fun be in that?”
Sienele didn’t bother to acknowledge that. He turned his focus entirely to the captured console system.
They’d tracked the unserialized weapons back to this facility, but it was just a transshipment point, not a manufacturer. The fact that the security was willing to go lethal on them when they showed up with the auditor’s documentation was a good sign that something was rotten, however.
Sorilla watched over Sienele’s shoulder, using her implants to record everything she was seeing and learning Alliance computer controls at the same time.
He quickly made his way through the information, with the sort of speed you only got from tens of thousands of hours of performing a task. It still took several minutes before Sienele straightened up.
“They are smugglers,” He sighed. “Almost certainly a cut-out for our primary targets, they don’t even know who they’re dealing with.”
Kriss growled, “Are you certain?”
“As I can be with only this little time to examine the evidence,” Sienele sighed, waving his hand. “I will pass it on to my department for thorough examination, of course. No doubt more will turn up there, but I doubt that they will find more on our ultimate targets.”
He looked around the room, and the bodies both dead and unconscious. “Likely, there will be more than enough to vastly increase the charges to levy against these traitors, not that additional ones are needed.”
“What now?” Kriss demanded.
Sienele sighed, “We will have to track the components, go to the locations they should have been manufactured, hope to find something there.”
Sorilla shook her head. This is going to take a long time.
*****
Hayden’s World, Sub-Continent
Cassius took a drink from the mug in his left hand, eyes focused up at the stars as he thought about the news he’d just been given.
The SOLCOM boys had been rather officious about it. Snotty was the term he’d have used if asked to describe them, telling him that his daughter had run off with the enemy. Officially, she was retired and had opted to spend time on a ‘cultural exchange’. Unofficially he could read between the lines.
SOLCOM wanted to leave the story unfinished, called her home before she was ready.
There was a time when she’d have sucked it up and done as she was told, but she was retired now. Cassius knew his Sorilla well enough to know that meant she was done taking orders if they didn’t make sense to her. He’d known that from the moment he got the communication about her buying up land here on Hayden.
At least SOLCOM isn’t looking to hang her, He thought darkly.
Not that they could, they’d made too much of a fuss about her heroics in the war. Turning on her would burn them worse than leaving her to do her thing, especially with the Brigadier still in her corner.
Mattan had come and given him the news in person, as much as he’d been allowed at least.
Wily old bastard, that one, Cassius thought.
He’d dropped enough hints for the story to be pieced together and seemed sincere when he apologized for not bringing her back.
Didn’t matter, though, not to Cassius. His little girl was out there, somewhere, and there wasn’t a human alive for lightyears around her.
Cassius laughed, a little drunkenly.
Probably feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven, girl. Come home safe.
*****
Alliance World, Orhkana
Sorilla looked around as she stepped down off the ramp from her ship, the Lucians and Sienele following behind. She lightly fingered the device resting around her neck, feeding filtered air to her as she walked.
Orhkana was a near-human world, as such things went, though not as close as Hayden by any means. Normally she wouldn’t need much, if any, filtration… at least not for a short visit. Unfortunately, it was one of the Alliance production worlds, strip-mined and harvested for generations in order to produce materials for the Alliance habitation worlds.
Unfiltered, she wasn’t convinced that the current atmosphere wouldn’t kill her in a day.
Even if it didn’t, she didn’t need the long-term health problems that would undoubtedly come from breathing the deeply polluted air.
“Welcome to Orhkana, Colonel,” Kriss said jovially from behind her, taking a deep breath of unfiltered air. “The…”
He paused, looking as pensive as a Lucian could while he searched for the right word.
“How is it you humans say it? The asshole of the Alliance?” He asked.
Sorilla nodded mildly, a smile playing at her lips. “The more polite might say the armpit instead, but yes, that does get the point across. I’m shocked that the local ecosphere is still intact.”
Kriss shrugged as they walked away from the ship, “Planetary ecologies are notoriously resilient. Many worlds have taken far worse than this and eventually managed to return to a reasonable state once the Alliance moved out. In a few centuries this place might be a garden world.”
She gave him a disbelieving glance, eliciting a laugh from the Lucian Sentinel.
“It will, of course, be entirely lethal to almost all species in just another few decades,” Sienele spoke up with a hint of what she thought was disgust in his voice. “The Alliance will abandon the world then, seeding it with the foundational flora to turn the world into a feed planet. Such worlds don’t require the resources currently being pulled from the crust.”
Sorilla shook her head but didn’t really have anything she could say about that. She could see the logic, but it made her human sensibilities rebel at the idea. Earth had come close to what she was seeing here, so close that it was still recovering even now. Destroying an entire ecosphere like it was a disposable asset left her guts roiling, but she knew that to the Alliance, it likely was disposable.
Earth didn’t have enough worlds to think like that, and part of her hoped it never did if this was the way that sort of wealth led. For the moment, however, she had other things to concern herself with.
“Where is the factory we’re looking for?” She asked, gravel crunching under her boots as she looked in both directions along the road that led from the landing field.
Kriss tapped her shoulder and pointed over it as she followed his gesture. In the distance, there was a squat, ugly construction that looked like it had been made in Soviet Russia during the Cold War. Solid, she had no doubt, but just looking at the place made her feel like her soul was being sucked out.
“Alright, let’s find these traitors of yours,” She said.
Kriss grinned, gesturing, “It will be a pleasure.”
The pair, followed by the remaining Sentinels, started walking down the road toward the ugly concrete building.
*****
People live here. Crap.
Some of the locals had come out to see what was going on, likely attracted by the unexpected arrival Sorilla supposed. Kriss had told her that usually, the planet was frequented entirely by bulk freighters, completely automated visits that landed, loaded, and left.
The locals were mostly of a species she’d had little interaction with, mostly during previous forays into Alliance space with the diplo-corps. Honestly, she didn’t even know the species name. They just seemed to be around but had never been part of any of the official receptions.
“What species are they?” She asked softly.
Kriss didn’t even look. “Sirhan. Minor culture. Joined the Alliance barely a century ago by your time. They don’t have space travel of their own yet but are always willing to hire out for grunt work. Don’t really remember where their world is, but they joined for protection from some unaffiliated species….”
“The Jara,” another Sentinal said from behind them.
“Right, Jara. I’ve not had the pleasure,” Kriss said.
From anyone else, Sorilla would have assumed he meant the pleasure of meeting them, but from her experience with Kriss and the Sentinals, she knew that he meant the pleasure of meeting them in combat.
“They are not special on the ground,” The Sentinal who spoke went on. “However, their space combat capabilities are apparently formidable.”
“Oh? Even against the Pari?” Kriss asked, interested.
“Very different, but yes even then. The Jara use massive ships that are very difficult to damage. They were causing the Alliance some issue until they encountered the Ross in battle. That… caused them to back off.”
Sorilla snorted, “A massive vessel is nothing to the Ross but a little extra boom.”
The Sentinels nodded.
Against conventional weapons, sheer mass could be a significant defense. SOLCOM ships were Sol-cast nickel-iron hulls with ceramic active armor plating. They could laugh off a nuke going off on the surface of the hull and keep on coming with a grin on their face.
Against a Ross gravity valve, however? All that iron and armor were just extra fodder for the gravity-induced fission explosion that was about to turn the ship into a star for a very brief instant of time. Mass was just more fuel for the fire.
Sorilla watched the locals as they passed them by, but all they did was watch nervously and curiously. They were dirty, but the entire area was coated in a layer of dust that had seemed to get thicker even as they walked through. Sorilla felt it clinging to her hair as she passed and was already rethinking the decision not to wear the suit’s helmet.
She didn’t want to meet people as a faceless automaton, however, as it would cripple many of her skills upfront. The Alliance peoples were not so different from humans in that regard, she’d learned that the hard way. No one wanted to talk to a faceless mask.
It only took a few moments before they reached the security fence for the factory building. Sienele stepped forward and presented the security with his credentials, the automated system automatically parting to let them in.
Sorilla watched the eyes that watched them back as they moved through, up until the fence closed again, blocking them from view. She didn’t quite get the air of despair from them that she had half come to expect, but there was something there. She just couldn’t quite place it.
They don’t see many others here, she thought, wondering if perhaps that was it. Possibly not, she let it go as the gates slid shut and left them inside the perimeter, walking toward the massive factory.
There were people waiting for them when they reached the entrance, none of them venturing out into the unfiltered air of the world and none of them from the Sirhan species. Sorilla filed that away. It was information that part of her was very interested in but, for the moment, it had little bearing on the mission at hand.
Sienele got them into the building through an air-locking system that subtly shifted the atmosphere as they moved through. Sorilla noticed her filtration system adjusting automatically and found herself impressed with the Alliance technology. With as many species as they had, coming into contact in various environments, it made sense that they would have tech devised specifically to allow for survival in as wide an array of environments as possible.
She was a little more impressed, and concerned, that they had something already built that was suitable for humans, however.
Sorilla let herself fade into the back of the group, allowing Sienele and Kriss to take the lead as they introduced themselves and handed over documents that gave them all access to the plant. After the mission on Allah’s Word, it had been clear that somewhere in the Alliance infrastructure, there was a rat in the works. They were playing pest control at the moment.
Weapons manufacture wasn’t, historically, easy to control. Not on Earth at least. Guns, swords, even some of the more esoteric hand weapons that were constantly nibbling at the edge of the mainstream, tended to be simple for a reason. Anything truly exotic was expensive and hard to maintain.
A laser that could cut a tank in half was awesome, but it was a lot less useful if no one could maintain it, power it, or carry the damn thing, for example.
That rugged simplicity was a requirement for a good weapon, but it also made it all but impossible to completely control the production and distribution of weapons. Sorilla was of a mind that this was largely a good thing.
She’d studied the nature of weapons and society, and she was well aware that without guns, or some equivalent equalizer… there was no democracy in any form.
She didn’t believe the tripe that an ‘armed society was a polite society’, or at least she didn’t think polite meant what the people who spouted that idiocy meant. Dueling could be very polite, after all, but people still ended up dead in the streets. An armed society was an armed society, nothing more, nothing less.
Guns, however, were a means of redistribution of power. They took one of the arrows from the quivers of the wealthy and handed it out to the masses. In many ways, the least of their arrows, but an important one nonetheless.
The Alliance had similar issues to Earth in this regard, so far as she could tell. Their gear had to be rugged and repairable in the field. That meant that there were fundamental limits on the control they could exercise over manufacture.
One of the things they could control, however, was power supplies.
Storing power was not an easy thing, especially when they had to interface with proprietary connections. Those were controllable, especially if you were careful about how much information about a given tech you allowed out.
That was why they were here, on this world and in this facility.
Orhkana was the main production point for small arms munitions and power supplies for the entire Alliance.
Sorilla smiled tightly as she watched the expressions on the various species present as they were presented with a legal document from the equivalent of an audit straight from Alliance intelligence, taking notes on the physiological reaction they were having to extreme stress.
Body language reading was stupidly difficult with alien physiology, so she was very happy to get any new data she could.
*****
Sienele stared at the plant supervisor, not showing any emotion as he laid out the documents that gave him full access to the entire facility. He found that he was better able to intimidate with an impersonal persona, and was more than happy to leave the blade sharpening looks to the Lucians.
I believe one of them actually is sharpening his knife, I swear they enjoy acting the fool.
“I… I do not understand, Envoy…” The plant supervisor stammered out. “We’ve filed all our documents with the Alliance as required…”
Sienele cut him off with a gesture. “This inspection is pursuant to evidence located during an operation on a pair of fringe worlds, Supervisor. Certain… items that should only have been constructed here were seized by our Lucian forces.”
He nodded back to Kriss and the others, barely able to avoid a scoffing look when the Lucians all smiled widely as one, and the one with the knife made a show of bringing it up to his face.
Honestly, it was a good thing the plant administrator team were scared, otherwise they’d likely have laughed at that silliness.
The supervisor was too distracted looking over the documents, pale and nervous as he flipped through page after page on the computer.
“I don’t understand,” He said after a moment. “Nothing here is questionable. We produce billions of these every year. It’s impossible to track them all.”
“If you produce billions of military-grade munitions… with no tracking codes embedded, then you and I will have to have a very long discussion.”
The supervisor pulled back, his expression aghast.
“No tracking… no, that’s not possible!”
“And yet, it happened… and we are going to determine, precisely, how… and why.”
Sienele smiled thinly, an expression that seemed to scare the man even more than the Lucian’s behind him had.
Excellent.
*****