Flashpoint (Book One of the Drive Maker Trilogy) Read online

  Marissa stuck out her arm, and they shook hands. Taylor vaguely recognized her name. If Joseph had contacted her, that meant Marissa was a former Resistance operative, so maybe she had done something notable in the war.

  “You’re working with Commander Moore?” Marissa asked.

  “You could say that.” Taylor weighed her words carefully. She needed to probe how strongly Marissa was aligned with Harrison. “What do you know about the Anniversary Attacks?”

  “Launched by the Alliance nine days ago. Killed more people than Icarus Day. I’m not on the Jacobin investigation, if that’s what you’re asking about.”

  “In a way,” Taylor said. “In addition to Joseph, I’m working with the Interstellar Emergency Service, and we have a different explanation for the Anniversary Attacks. We think they were funded, at least partially, by Griffin Space Technologies.”

  “Huh.”

  Not a negative response. That was good.

  “Marissa, we need your help.”

  “You want me to betray Harrison.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I would put it like that.” Taylor felt a flush of uncertainty. Sure, Harrison wouldn’t approve of what they were doing, but he didn’t have to know about it—calling it betrayal made it sound like they were asking her to become some kind of rogue MRSIS agent. “All we need is some information. We are going to pursue Griffin ourselves, but we’re going to do it undercover, so it doesn’t interfere with Harrison’s anti-Jacobin agenda. He might give it to us himself if he had the political cover to do so.”

  He might. There was a chance, however small.

  “Harrison doesn’t usually need political cover.”

  True.

  “Can you at least confirm whether the MRSIS has any sources inside GST or not?” Taylor asked.

  “We do.”

  “Excellent,” Taylor said. “So if you—”

  “They’re restricted-access.”

  “What?” Taylor asked.

  “Only Harrison’s upper echelon can access those sources without permission.” Marissa gave Taylor a look as if this should mean something to her.

  “That means… there is something going on they don’t want you to know?” Taylor asked. “Like… a lead on the Alliance! Which they don’t want lower-level MRSIS agents to see because they will realize that Harrison’s prosecution of the Jacobins is partisan, and there’s a better lead they could be following if they actually wanted to catch the Alliance!”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well, what else could it be?” Taylor asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Marissa, if we can get access to those sources, we might be able to end the threat of the Alliance right now. Before the next attack.”

  “With the TKG?”

  Taylor blinked. “Yes, I think the TKG will have to carry out the raid. I don’t think the IES has the firepower.”

  Then again, she hadn’t known that IES officers carried nonlethal sidearms until earlier today.

  “So you start a fight. The TKG and your Emergency Service against the MRSIS. How does that fight end?”

  “No!” Taylor said. “We’re not starting a power struggle. This is just a one-time operation.”

  “A one-time hit against an organization under the MRSIS’s protection. Do you think Ryan Harrison forgives easily? I want to know if you’re ready for those consequences.”

  “He doesn’t have to find out,” Taylor said. “If you retrieve the information stealthily—”

  “He always finds out. So is your goal worth fighting for?”

  “We don’t have to start a fight,” Taylor said.

  “That tells me it’s not.” Marissa pushed away from the pedestal, then grabbed its upper edge and vaulted atop it.

  “Marissa!” Taylor turned to look up at the memorial, but her contact was already gone. Taylor could pursue her, but that would do little more than aggravate her further.

  Instead, Taylor pulled out her transceiver and queried the Kindred Spirit. “It’s off.”

  “We’ll send a control boat down,” Brook said, disappointment evident in her voice.

  Taylor closed the communications channel. They had hit a dead end. Even if JP came up with some magic legal solution, there was so little time left to implement it. Festivities in Telahmir would not commence until dawn, but it would be Treaty Day in Standard Time even sooner than that, leaving the Republic wide open to whatever attack the Alliance had planned next. If only she had refused to come to Meltia, she would still be at her post over Cryzdeklith, ready to help out if her home was targeted by the Alliance again, but now she could not even do that. She could volunteer to help the Meltian MRES branch, but Meltia was already probably the best-defended planet in the Republic, so whatever additional benefit she could render would be small.

  A control boat descended from the black sky to touch down in the middle of the square, drawing the attention of the parade workers, but Taylor was beyond caring about them. Perhaps Harrison was right—not about the Jacobins, but about their “quest” being misguided. In the end, she had abandoned her homeworld and the job that brought her peace after the Order War, and for what? The chance to play politics in Telahmir? It was a fool’s trade.

  Taylor shielded her eyes as she stepped from the darkened square into the brightly-lit interior of the gunboat. Hezekiah was there.

  “So our agent friend wasn’t ready to throw off Harrison’s shackles after all, huh?” he asked.

  “No,” Taylor said. “I couldn’t convince her. It’s my fault.”

  “I’m sure you did everything you could,” Hezekiah said. “And anyway, all might not be lost. JP’s trying to figure out if there’s a legal way to compel Harrison to turn over that information, and Joseph’s got a strike team on standby.”

  “Don’t.” Taylor knew he was inflating their chances for her benefit.

  He put an arm across her shoulders, drawing her out of her thoughts of defeat and into that moment, in the back of the brightly-lit control boat, slowly rising away from Telahmir.

  “You’ve done your job,” he said. “More than your job. Worrying yourself about it isn’t going to do a spot of good for anyone. The best thing you can do is take a break, so when Brook and JP need your talents again—which I suspect will be soon—you’ll be on top of your game.”

  “Hm,” Taylor said.

  “You know,” Hezekiah said, “the Telahmir Treaty Day parade is supposed to be a pretty entertaining affair. Joseph said his soldiers were putting together some kind of telekinetic act. Unless something comes up in the night, I’m going to go see it, and I’d love for you to come with me.”

  “Of cou—” Taylor froze as her brain caught up to her mouth. A part of her protested that, despite this Meltian adventure, she was still Hezekiah’s commanding officer, and thus any kind of… non-professional relationship between them, or any implication that there was anything like that, would be highly inappropriate. Then again, the Telahmir Treaty Day parade was hardly a midnight tryst—if past years were any guide, three-quarters of the Meltian population would watch it in some form, including nearly one hundred percent of visitors like herself.

  Hezekiah gave her an expectant look.

  “Of course,” Taylor reiterated. To refuse at this point would be rude.

  Hezekiah’s face relaxed into a relieved smile. “Great.”

  Cherran DeGuavra followed two Meltian Guardsmen down the boarding ramp of his Brave-class shuttle and onto the authentic clay bricks of Telahmir’s Dawn Beltway. Most of the bricks in the inner city were beaten down by centuries of pedestrians, but the Dawn Beltway was a mere eight years old, marking the new circumference of the city after its post-Order-War expansion. Cherran took in the scene, the open air exhilarating after his long stay on the Samuel Gunther Space Station. To his left, modern buildings towered over him, while to his right, an Airshell field was all that protected the city from the scorching desert that surrounded it, and just ahead, dozens of ma
rchers and hoverplatforms draped in Meltian red prepared to commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Galactica.

  The two guardsmen took up positions on either side of Cherran, sear gun carbines slung across their chests. Cherran was more than a little irritated that Shuping insisted he bring them, and he planned to summarily dismiss them as soon as he made contact with Gerald. Even with the Alliance terror threat, he doubted he was in any danger during a diplomatic rendezvous in the middle of the capital of the Meltian Republic, and he certainly did not need them standing around looking intimidating while he was trying to talk to a skittish Kaleknarian ambassador.

  Unfortunately, Gerald was nowhere to be found.

  Now that Cherran thought about it, a Kaleknarian would not be particularly welcome in Telahmir on Treaty Day, which had morphed over the years into an extremely patriotic holiday—and it was not like it would be easy for Gerald to disguise himself as a humanoid.

  Cherran searched the street for anything that looked vaguely like a disguised Kaleknarian, and he had just about settled on a suspiciously-shaped bush when a Meltian kid ran up to him. Cherran snatched a GripInk fountain pen from under his suit jacket, beaming. “Hey, buddy, what should I sign?”

  “Huh?” The kid looked at him, wide-eyed. “I’m supposed to give this to you.”

  He held out a small key with a green light on it.

  Cherran took the key, crestfallen. “You don’t want my signature?”

  “Who are you?” the kid asked.

  Cherran drew himself up to his full height. “I am the Ambassador of the Meltian Republic to PanGal.”

  The kid cocked his head to the side. “What does PanGal do?”

  “Between you and me,” Cherran said, “not much.”

  A Meltian woman ran up to them, taking the kid’s hand—probably his mother.

  “Danny, don’t bother these people.” She turned to Cherran. “I’m sorry, he claims a monster gave it to him and told him to deliver it to a man in a suit who came from space.”

  Cherran examined the object Danny handed to him; it appeared to be a hotel room key, stylized as an actual metal key. Looking up, he saw that the color scheme matched that of a hotel barely twenty meters away, and the room number was engraved in the metal.

  “Actually, Ma’am, I think this might be exactly what we were looking for.” Cherran saluted Danny. “Good work!”

  Danny returned the salute.

  Cherran motioned to his guardsmen, and they made for the hotel. They garnered a lot of curious looks as they edged through the lobby, which was packed with holiday travelers, but they snagged an open elevator and quickly located the room to which the key corresponded. Cherran held the key up to the door, and it slid open to allow him in.

  Gerald was slumped against the wall, a hole burned through his head.

  “Gerald!” Cherran said.

  “Sir, get down!”

  Cherran dove to the floor, and his guardsmen dropped into crouches, sweeping the room with their weapon sights. Perhaps Shuping was more prescient than he gave her credit for.

  “Clear.”

  Cherran scrambled to his feet, running only to drop to kneel in front of Gerald. He was no doctor, but the Kaleknarian was undeniably dead, as was the personal screen on the floor next to him, which had received a sear gun bolt of its own. Cherran lifted the device. There was no burn mark on the floor below it, but several of Gerald’s appendages were scorched separately from the bolt that had killed him, meaning that the Kaleknarian had been clutching the device when it was punctured by a sear gun bolt.

  Whatever had been on that device, Gerald had died trying to protect it.

  The death carried an air of finality, as if Cherran’s hopes for peace had been extinguished alongside his Kaleknarian friend. After all, his only contact was dead, and the evidence Gerald was planning to give to Cherran had been deliberately destroyed. The Meltian government was planning a war. At best, the Kaleknarians were uncooperative; at worst, Gerald’s own government was behind his assassination, actively working to keep Meltia in the dark.

  In fact, Cherran could not think of anyone but the Kaleknarians who would know where Gerald was staying in Telahmir, and there were no fallen bodyguards next to Gerald, indicating that the Kaleknarians had chosen not to supply him with any—unless the bodyguards had been complicit in the murder and walked away afterward.

  Cherran threw a glance at his own guardsmen, but immediately regretted even that fleeting suspicion. The Kaleknarians were the only ones who would pull a trick like this.

  Yet despite all this, Cherran knew the finality of Gerald’s death was false. After all, as Shuping constantly reminded him, he was the son of a man who faced down the most stacked odds of all time to take down the whole Galactic Government.

  Cherran laid his hand on Gerald’s back once more. “Tell my old man that I’m not quite finished yet.”

  “Uh, what should we do, sir?” one of the guardsmen asked.

  “You should get a cleanup team out here to sweep the room for evidence and take care of the body.” Cherran stood, still holding the screen. “And you should get the best computer experts in the Meltian Republic to help us figure out what in the galaxy was on this device.”

  Cherran pulled out his FSO transceiver and punched in Samuel Gunther’s address.

  Taylor followed in the wake of Hezekiah’s broad shoulders as they waded through the throngs of Meltians lining Telahmir’s Main Street, most sporting Meltian-red T-shirts and waving flags emblazoned with the stylized-torch emblem of the Meltian Republic. The atmosphere of unbounded patriotism was intoxicating… except for the fact that Treaty Day was not exactly a celebration of the Meltian Republic.

  “Isn’t Treaty Day supposed to celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Galactica?” Taylor had to almost shout for Hezekiah to hear her. “The return of peace to the galaxy after the Order War?”

  At any rate, that seemed to be a much better reason to celebrate than these peoples’ patriotism, especially since the government they were expressing pride in had been nothing short of obstructionist toward the IES’s investigation.

  “JP was telling me about this,” Hezekiah said. “Apparently Treaty Day kind of transformed into a patriotic holiday after the war, since Meltia doesn’t celebrate the anniversary, and Meltians are, as you can imagine, pretty proud of their namesake Republic.”

  “Meltia doesn’t celebrate the Anniversary of the Battle of Meltia?”

  Hezekiah shrugged. “It’s some political thing. They want to recognize how other planets also suffered for the cause, and all that. JP could tell you mo—”

  He was cut off by a roar of approval from the surrounding crowd. Taylor turned toward the street just in time to see two interceptors soar overhead, performing high-speed aileron rolls and thereby dispensing spiraling red smoke trails from their wingtips. A third followed closely behind, firing a series of white and yellow smart fireworks that coalesced into an enormous glittering torch in the sky.

  “Meltia! Flip, yeah!” somebody yelled close to Taylor’s ear, waving a Meltian flag.

  Even before the roar faded, a countervailing “Boo!” went up. The cheering immediately resurged to drown it out.

  It was easy to spot the source of the opposing cry: a white tumor in a sea of Meltian red. Instead of the Meltian torch, their banners and clothing displayed a vertical black line with two smaller lines splitting off from it near the bottom at a downward angle, like an inverted leafless tree, on a white background. A cordon of Meltian Guardsmen divided the protestors from the pro-Meltians, though it was unclear whom they were protecting from whom.

  “Who are those people?” Taylor asked Hezekiah.

  As if in response to her question, two of the protestors unfurled a white banner that read in bold font, “Protect the Human Race.”

  The Human Race—the King of Cryzdeklith had mentioned them as a movement that was ideologically in the same camp as Mantradome and the Alliance.

  Taylor c
hecked to make sure her Newface was secure.

  “Let’s keep going,” Hezekiah said.

  Taylor nodded and followed him toward the termination of Main Street at Freedom Square. As they walked, she noticed that the city’s climate control engineers were somehow beating back the mass of body heat to keep the temperature below sweltering, but the swelling of noise and pride was still powerful—almost enough to make one forget that there were other governments, conflicts and wretchedness that had come out of the post-war galaxy laid out by the Treaty of Galactica. Perhaps that was the point. Most Meltian politicians touted the Order War as a positive development, so if they were going to have a holiday about the war at all, they were going to celebrate the few good things that came out of it.

  Then again, while the positive results were few, they were real. The Meltian Republic was not perfect, but it was a lot better than the GG or Kaleknar, and at least some divisions of it were trying to protect its people. Taylor tilted her head back to watch the tiny dots that were tracing out patrol patterns far above the city—Meltian Guard interceptors, ready to eliminate any attacker, regardless of whether they complied with Harrison’s narrative.

  “Taylor, look, it’s the TKG.”

  Taylor brought her gaze back down to the ground to see at least an entire company of TKG soldiers kneeling in a square formation in the street. As they raised their arms, hundreds of bricks pulled loose from the street around them, swirling into two pillars that quickly became the legs of a skyscraper-sized flying-brick humanoid. It lifted its arms and did a few martial arts moves to the cheering of the crowds on either side of the street. Then it reached a hand down into the crowd, all under the careful control of the soldiers, and lifted a young Meltian couple on a platform of bricks. One or both of them screamed as the brick colossus raised them higher than the tops of the surrounding towers.

  Taylor laughed, clapping along with the crowd, and was about to turn back to Hezekiah when she spotted something behind the elevated couple. Six somethings, actually: starships, and not civilian ones judging by the speed at which they were traveling. At first, she thought they were another demonstration squadron, but as they approached, it became clear that they were factory-gray gunboats, not Meltian-red interceptors… and they were not headed toward the parade.