BattleTech: The Spider Dances: The Proliferation Cycle #6, page 2
Nehru smiled thinly. “No.”
Vocaine looked up. His frown displayed his confusion. “Then…?”
“I am not a courier, General,” Nehru said. “If you were to be relieved, you’d have gotten orders. I am far too valuable to waste delivering orders.” He paused, listening to his own heartbeat. The hum of the air conditioning system reverberated just beneath hearing. He felt it, deep in his chest. “Information is leaking from Happen, General. Information from your project.”
“That’s impossible.” Vocaine’s lips pulled back from his frown, showing his teeth. “Our security is airtight, Colonel.”
“Not so airtight that you’re naming the specific chassis under construction here in the doorway to a public corridor.” Nehru held the general’s stare. “No one is to know what kinds of BattleMechs we’re constructing here, General. No one.”
“My people are trustworthy—”
“No one is trustworthy,” Nehru said simply. His voice was calm, but his tone was steel-tinged. “No one.”
Vocaine opened his mouth to retort, then evidently thought better of it. “You said information is leaking. Not that it might—is. What information?”
“Both the Lyran Intelligence Corps and the Maskirovka know we are constructing BattleMechs. The Lyrans, of course, already have their own. The Capellans do not.” Nehru wetted his lips. “The Maskirovka is on Xanthe right now.”
“You know this? For certain?”
“Of course we know it. They have operatives on all our worlds. Just as we have NIA agents on each of theirs.”
Vocaine leaned over his desk, interlacing his fingers before him. “Then it’s a general threat you’re worried about.”
“No, it’s the team that has almost certainly penetrated this military reservation already that worries me.”
“Penetrated? Happen?”
“Yes, General. Do try to keep up.” Nehru slid a datacard out of his pocket and proffered it. When the general took it out of his hands he spoke. “I dealt with the normal Mask cell on Xanthe three weeks ago. The Confederation still lacks BattleMech technology. Therefore, there are still operatives here. And Happen is the most vital target on Xanthe.”
“I don’t—”
“Our ’Mechs grant us parity with the Steiners,” Nehru said. “And, of course, the Terrans. But if the Capellan Confederation gains access to the technology before we’re able to bring significant numbers of them to bear, we’ll be deadlocked there, too.”
On the wall behind the general’s desk was a framed two-dimensional print of a Mackie BattleMech surrounded by burning tanks. The Mackie wore the Marik eagle—the tanks had no identifiable markings, nor were they identifiable models. Simply made generic enough to represent the enemies of the Free Worlds League being crushed underfoot.
“And you think the Mask has infiltrated my unit?” Vocaine asked.
“It would idiocy to assume otherwise.”
“Then you’re here—”
“To stop them,” Nehru said. “You will alert your security teams. I have protocols for searches to be run. They are on that datacard. Possible responses to be flagged are also appended. On the Inspectorate’s authority, I have warned the governor that I may be halting all traffic to and from Xanthe soon. On that same authority I will shortly visit General Bangs—” the base commander, “—and tell him the same thing about Happen.”
Vocaine looked up at him. “You seem awfully young for a colonel,” he observed.
Nehru smiled. “I am very good at what I do, General,” he said. “If my appearance helps other people to underestimate me, so much the better. Perhaps you think I should have arrived in the black holovid storm-trooper’s outfit, complete with commissariat cap and black-visored goon squad?”
Vocaine shook his head.
“I thought not.” Nehru inhaled sharply, audibly. “Now. Shall you introduce me to General Bangs?”
HAPPEN MILITARY RESERVATION
40 KILOMETERS EAST OF BARTER
XANTHE III
FREE WORLDS LEAGUE
19 MARCH 2466
Halle Ostend looked up and smiled politely as Ned Reyes sat down across from her in the staff cafeteria. She was sitting by herself near the end of the line, smiling and giving little waves to people she knew as they passed, but her attention was—so far as the room was concerned, at least—glued to the novel displayed on her noteputer’s screen.
“What are you reading?” Reyes asked. He slid his fork beneath the slab of suspicious-looking gray meat and sniffed it carefully. His cap was pushed back high on his head, letting a bit of his brush-cut black hair show. The silver tabs on the shoulders of his gray security uniform mimicked military insignia without actually being them.
“Barrett,” she said. “Twice Met by Moonlight.”
“Is that the one after or before Starlight Epitaph?”
“After,” she said. Her eyes and her smile said, “Wow.” Her mind muttered shit. “You read Barrett?”
“When I get the chance,” Reyes said, continuing the game. Every week or so he sat down in the cafeteria across from her. He always asked what she was reading, and never recognized the title. Anyone watching would see a man with a crap job trying to court a woman two steps above his pay grade. “Are you free tonight, Halle?”
“Sure,” she said. “What’d you have in mind?”
“Meet me here, twenty-hundred? Just a cup of coffee, maybe a walk in the courtyard?” He smiled and cut his meat. “Nothing much. I don’t get to talk to many people about books.”
“Me either,” she said. She tapped her book closed and stood up. “I’ll see you tonight then, Ned. I’ve got to get back to work.”
Reyes stood and tipped his hat. “Sure. See you then.”
Halle deposited her tray on the conveyor and walked into the corridor. It was a four-minute walk back to her desk. She spent every second of those four minutes commanding her heart to slow down, commanding her skin to cool.
Starlight Epitaph meant danger close enough to threaten the mission. Not now.
Not when I’m so close!
If NIA was on to them, there was no sign in the cafeteria. Reyes was waiting for her when she arrived, already holding two cups of good Galisteo coffee and smiling. They sat for a few minutes, talking about Barrett’s books.
He was popular on Marik and Atreus—his novels were simple affairs, thrillers who set the fiercely loyal NIA agent Malcolm Rae against the best of the LIC. The Maskirovka, when it appeared in his pages at all, were portrayed as slant-eyed buffoons incapable of discovering the cost of bus fare, much less military secrets. I wonder what he’ll say when he learns the Maskirovka stole the plans for Marik’s BattleMechs?
“Shall we go for a walk?” Reyes finally asked.
“I’d love to,” Halle told him. No one appeared to watch when they stood up and walked out the door to the courtyard. There were several other couples sitting apart from each other already, and several more had preceded them out into the two-square-kilometer park. Happen’s residents—military and civilian—were forbidden to leave except on the weekends. “Walking” in the courtyard was a popular pastime.
“Is this safe?” she murmured when they were down one of the trails and out of sight of the cafeteria building. A Xanthe grass-shredder scritched in the night, calling for a mate. She’d heard them often when she was out at night. Esterhazy liked to come out here in the dark, when she couldn’t convince him how much she liked “christening” other peoples’ desks.
“As safe as can be,” he whispered back. The rustling leaves would give most passive recorders trouble; the trees would block directional microphones. Unless there was a listener hiding in the shrubs—and they both knew how to look for those—they should be safe. “We’ve got trouble.”
“How much trouble?”
“We need to go tomorrow—or else abort.”
Halle stopped walking. She slipped her arms around Reyes and leaned in close, as if she were going to nuzzle his neck. His hand came up automatically, pressing against the back of her head. “Are we burned?” She smelled the coffee on her breath as it was reflected back from his neck. Reyes shivered. They might only be acting, but a woman’s breath on a man’s neck usually provokes a common reaction.
“The Inspectorate is here.”
Halle hissed a curse. “You’re sure?”
“Bangs called us all in and told us himself. They suspect.”
“Us?”
“Does it matter?”
Halle squeezed his shoulders and leaned back. “Tomorrow, then?”
“Can you be ready?”
“I think… Yes.” She considered. Esterhazy had been getting insistent lately. She’d put him off since their last visit—demurely, to be sure—and he was getting anxious. It shouldn’t be any trouble to urge him to retrace his steps. She named the corridor junction where she’d seen the guard. “Can you take his place?”
Reyes nodded. He tipped his head down, as if he were going to kiss her. She smelled the coffee on his breath now. “I’ll signal,” he said. “You have a plan to get out?”
Halle smiled. “I’m going to ride out through the front gate.”
Reyes smiled back. “A diversion, then?”
“Tell Quinn we need the big one.”
Then she kissed him. Just in case anyone was watching.
XANTHE RESERVE MILITIA AERODROME
BARTER STARPORT
XANTHE III
FREE WORLDS LEAGUE
19 MARCH 2466
Fyodor Danilov looked at the message displayed on his noteputer and frowned. Tomorrow? He cleared the message and stuck his head into the next room. “Edgar. Tomorrow?”
Edgar Tibbetts was reclining on a cot, skimming through the day’s news. He set his ’puter down and stared at Danilov. “Tomorrow?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Shit.” Danilov watched the other man think. “No. Day after next. Best we can do.”
“Little won’t like that,” Danilov said.
“Little’s not in charge of getting us wings,” he said. “There’s nothing tomorrow. Military flights. We’re not getting on those.” He looked down at his ’puter and tapped the screen a few times. “Day after we got three liners and half a dozen shuttles. Easier.”
“I’ll tell him.” Danilov nodded and pulled the door shut as he went. He tapped the message screen open and sent two words: day after. Then he closed the messenger and slid the noteputer under his arm. At the other end of the corridor he stopped in front of a door with an electronic keypad. The sequence was the same, and the door slid open. Two men in uniforms looked up as he entered.
“Feel better, Dan?” one of them asked.
“Yes, sir,” Danilov answered. He went to the third console, the one marked flight controller, and sat down. “Sorry, Captain. Really had to hit the head.”
Captain bar-Danan shrugged. “Nature calls, right?”
“Right, sir. Any traffic while I was away?”
The officer shook his head. “Nothing. We had a memo from higher, though. The governor sent a warning order that he might have to close the port sometime next week, though. Just the off-planet stuff—the air-breathing stuff can continue.”
Danilov nodded as he slipped his headset back on. “Sounds like easy work for us then,” he said.
And next week is just fine, he thought. We’ll be long gone by then.
HAPPEN MILITARY RESERVATION
40 KILOMETERS EAST OF BARTER
XANTHE III
FREE WORLDS LEAGUE
20 MARCH 2466
Reginald Bangs was a tiny man. He stood a meter-sixty in his dress boots, but Nehru suspected there were several centimeters of lift in those boots. He stood behind a bank of hunched-over men and women who were all intently massaging data from a string of consoles.
Nehru stood near him, eyes mostly unfocused, letting his ears listen and his peripheral vision watch for the telltale jerk of someone finding something unexpected.
“You could have come straight to me,” Bangs said quietly. “I’ve dealt with your office before. You needn’t have surprised Vocaine that way.”
“General Vocaine needed surprising,” Nehru said, not looking at the small general. “He was getting complacent. Complacency breeds mistakes, and the Maskirovka needs only one mistake to succeed.”
“It might help if you told us what we’re looking for,” Bangs said a moment later.
Nehru resisted the urge to sigh. He hated sighs. There was no more useless sound than a sigh—it said, “I’m disappointed, but not enough to actually speak.” Instead, he blinked his eyes back into focus and turned to regard General Bangs. “I have given your security analysts a series of checks to make. They will determine if there is more to be done.”
“Checks?”
“Facial recognition, mostly.”
“You know what these spies look like?”
“No. But I have security recordings of everyone seen near the safehouse we raided to eradicate the long-term Mask team on Xanthe. Right now your computers are comparing those faces to the faces of your staff and soldiers.”
Bangs ogled. “But that’s—”
“More than six thousand people,” Nehru said. “And the cameras caught nine thousand discrete faces.”
“That’s…”
“A lot of faces,” Nehru said. “You might return to your duties, General. I’m more than capable of standing here alone.”
“But if one of them pops up—”
“You’ll be the third person to know.”
Bangs frowned. “Third?”
Nehru blinked, keeping his eyes closed perhaps an instant longer than necessary. “The first person will be the technician sorting the data. I will be the second. You will be the third.”
“Oh.” Bangs glanced both ways down the rows of analysts poring over screens and noteputers. “Then—”
“Sir?”
Nehru spun. A young woman at the far end was holding up her hand halfway. Her attention was still on the screen in front of her. Nehru strode over to stand behind her. Bangs followed.
“Soldier?” Nehru prompted.
“We’ve got a match,” she said. She toggled the screen out of the waterfall display of searched comparisons and brought up one that was blinking.
A grainy security camera image filled the left side of the screen; on the right was an ID card mug shot. Nehru watched the flickering traceries as the computer illustrated points of congruence—cheekbones, chin, distance between the eyes. It was the same man.
Nehru straightened. “Tell me, General,” he said. “Where might I find civilian auxiliary Ned Reyes?”
Esterhazy was slobbering, he was so excited. He followed Halle down the corridor, toward the same armored door as the other evening. She made sure to put a sway into her hips, but moved fast enough that he couldn’t get a finger under the seam of her skirt, despite his determined attempts.
It was mid-morning. The first shift would be just about into their coffee break. When she’d first discovered the console, Halle had planned to come back during third shift, when no one but the manufacturing crew was on. The design and testing teams kept a more normal schedule, but production ran around the clock. She was a little concerned that the man whose office they intended to…borrow…would be in it. But Esterhazy said he’d take care of that.
“Senior technician, remember?” he’d boasted.
It had been ridiculously simple to get him to agree. All she’d had to do was wear the herringbone skirt and her hair back. A judicious lean over, a loose button on her blouse, and a lascivious whisper in Esterhazy’s ear had been all that was required to bring the large man away from his break-room snack and into the corridor.
“Again,” she’d moaned.
“What, now?”
“Now.”
Esterhazy had glanced both ways down the corridor. “Where?”
“The same place as before.” She’d stepped close to him, close enough that her shoes had touched the edge of his boots; close enough that her breasts had pressed against his stomach. “It was so amazing, Robert. I need it again. Now.”
That was all it had taken.
They were getting close. Halle turned the last corner and saw Reyes standing the guard post. He was judiciously ignoring her, but he braced to attention when Esterhazy stumbled after her. She smiled at him from beneath her bangs and spun around, falling backward against the door.
“It’s a different guard,” she whispered to Esterhazy. “Can we still…?”
Esterhazy grinned. “Of course we can.” He ignored Reyes and keyed his code into the keypad. The door slid open. Halle stepped through backward, her left hand clutching the lapel of Esterhazy’s coveralls. The technician followed her through, and the door slid shut behind him. He pushed her back farther, against the wall, and pressed himself against her. Then he kissed her. He tasted like two-day-old corned beef.
Halle shuddered. He would think it was excitement. Excitement and revulsion were two heads of the same coin. She twisted away from him and started down the hall. “Now, which room was it…?”
“Eight-Bravo,” Esterhazy said. He pointed. “There.”
“The door…”
Esterhazy stepped past her and hit the door announce. The sound of the chime carried through the thin extruded plastic. He waited. Halle leaned in behind him and breathed on his neck. He moaned almost inaudibly.
“Knock, knock,” she whispered.
He signaled again. No one came to the door. He grunted and keyed a combination into the keypad. The door slid open.
He half turned, grabbed her hand, and twisted, flinging her into the room before him. Her thighs hit the desk hard and she fell across it, just like the other night. She heard the door slide closed behind her, straightened up, and spun around to sit on the edge of the desk. She slid back so the backs of her knees were against the edge of the desk. A blotter and a noteputer shifted beneath her.
Esterhazy was still by the door. He was wringing his hands in front of him, watching her. His eyes flicked from her face to her chest to her knees and back, a half second at each point. As if he couldn’t decide what he wanted to look at.
