The Cure, page 1
Books in the AGENCY Series
Eve of War
The Favor
The Cure
Books in the PANTHEON Series
Hecate
Tridyma
Books in the COLONY Series
QUANT
ARCADIA
GALACTIC SURVEY
SILK ROAD
LOST COLONY
EARTH
Books in the EMPIRE Series
by Richard F. Weyand:
EMPIRE: Reformer
EMPIRE: Usurper
EMPIRE: Tyrant
EMPIRE: Commander
EMPIRE: Warlord
EMPIRE: Conqueror
by Stephanie Osborn:
EMPIRE: Imperial Police
EMPIRE: Imperial Detective
EMPIRE: Imperial Inspector
EMPIRE: Section Six
by Richard F. Weyand:
EMPIRE: Intervention
EMPIRE: Investigation
EMPIRE: Succession
EMPIRE: Renewal
EMPIRE: Resistance
EMPIRE: Resurgence
Books in the Childers Universe
by Richard F. Weyand:
Childers
Childers: Absurd Proposals
Galactic Mail: Revolution
A Charter For The Commonwealth
Campbell: The Problem With Bliss
by Stephanie Osborn:
Campbell: The Sigurdsen Incident
The Cure
An Agency Thriller
by
RICHARD F. WEYAND
Copyright 2023 by Richard F. Weyand
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-1-954903-14-2
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Credits
Cover Art: Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari,
www.rotwangstudio.com
Back Cover Photo: Oleg Volk
Published by Weyand Associates, Inc.
Bloomington, Indiana, USA
February 2023
CONTENTS
Home Sweet Home
Lingering Problems
The Deal
Assignment
Target Acquisition
The Beach
The First Briefing
The Analysis
En Route
Arrival On Crossroads
Kendall And Mangum
Departure From Crossroads
Traveling En Duo
The Void
Katas And Matches
Needle In A Haystack
Splitting Up
Arrival On Earth
Surveillance
Davian Varley
The Decision
Preparation
Escape From Anacapa Island
In Hiding
The Search Begins
The Search Continues
The Search Fizzles Out
Intermezzo
Departure
Discovery And Disaster
Counterstrike And Flight
Debrief
A Long Trip
Mardouk, Gaston, Wilbourne
Again The Void
Reconnoiter And Recovery
Home At Last
Portnoy, Dent, Varley, Stavros
Isabela Febo
Claude Portnoy
Gloria Dent
The BIE And The Agency
Lots Going On
Goodbye Party
Settling In
Author’s Afterword
Home Sweet Home
Marceau’s was crowded tonight. The five-star restaurant in downtown Ashur on the planet Mardouk, the capital city and capital planet of the Association of Planets, was the finest eatery within hundreds of light-years, perhaps within the six star nations of the local star cluster.
Unusual for a Wednesday, there was a line at the maitre d’ hotel’s counter in the lobby bar. Others, already on the list, drank cocktails in the bar, waiting for their table.
An elegant and attractive young couple walked past the line to the maitre d’s counter. She was beautiful, with long auburn hair. He was handsome, in an edgy sort of way. He did not look like the sort of man one would want to trifle with.
The maitre d’ saw them and smiled warmly.
“Good evening, Ms. Stavros. Mr. Mangum.”
The young woman smiled back at him. It was a beautiful smile, a smile one wanted to savor. A smile one wanted to see again.
“Good evening, Francois. A good crowd tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am. Right this way, please.”
Francois led them across the full dining room to the one empty table, in the far diagonal corner of the room. Francois seated Stavros while Mangum sat, in chairs against the wall, facing out across the room. He did not bring along menus, as these regular patrons did not need them.
“The Ridley Parsons Reserve Cabernet this evening, sir?”
“You read my mind, Francois.”
“Very good, sir. I’ll see to it. Have a pleasant dinner.”
After dinner, Bert Mangum and Elina Stavros walked down the block the short distance to The 909. It was a pleasant evening in the capital. As all six capital planets of the local star cluster had been the first-colonized, and therefore the most desirable, a pleasant evening in Ashur was pleasant indeed.
“Ms. Stavros. Mr. Mangum. I hope dinner was satisfying,” the doorman said, pushing the button on the wall behind him that opened the double sliding glass doors into the condominium building.
“Yes, Steven. I think Marceau’s is actually improving with time.”
“Excellent, sir.”
Mangum and Stavros took one of the elevators to the top floor, where she opened the door of a corner unit fitted with a bio-lock on the door. As he entered, he scanned the security panel on the side wall of the entry. Neither the main door nor the fire-escape door to the unit had been opened since they left.
Stavros walked across the elegantly decorated living room to their favorite seats, a pair of armchairs that took full advantage of the two glass walls that met in the far corner of the large room. Mangum walked across to the bar and poured an excellent twenty-five-year-old cognac – Girarden Exquis – into two large snifters he had put in the warmer before they left, then joined her in the other armchair.
“Thank you, Bert,” Stavros said as he handed her one of the snifters.
Mangum raised his snifter in salute.
“Happy anniversary, Elina.”
“Anniversary?”
“Why, yes. It’s been a month since we came back to Ashur from Crossroads. Since we got married.”
“Ah. Well, then. Happy anniversary, Bert.”
They both sipped, then sighed and looked out at the capital, laid out in stunning panorama before them. One wall looked out over Central Park, the huge recreational green space in the heart of the city, toward the towers of downtown beyond. The other wall looked out at the government center, the seat of the government of the Association of Planets, arguably the wealthiest and most successful of the six local star nations.
The buildings, the lights, the traffic were mesmerizing.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of this view,” she said.
Mangum smiled. He was pleased that his wife liked the view from his condo. He loved the view as well and would have hated to move, though he would have to please her.
“It’s been six years for me, and I still love it. More, even, than before. It’s like I’m seeing it anew, through your eyes.”
Sam and Jules came into the living room and sat on a facing loveseat. The two shape-shifting aliens were in their utility personas. Sam was in the form of an adult human male, while Jules was smaller, a pre-teen human male. Both appeared to be dressed in coveralls, though those were merely a color change on their surfaces.
Both looked like statues in progress, where the sculptor had gotten the basic shape complete but had yet to add all the fine detail. It was the simplest impersonation for the aliens, whose natural form was more of a brownish orange semi-fluid mound unavailing for socializing with humans.
“How was dinner?” Sam asked.
“Excellent. I think Marceau’s is improving over time. What will you guys do for supper?”
“We were thinking of a couple of pizzas from downstairs. We’re not quite hungry yet. That was a big lunch.”
Mangum nodded. They had between them knocked off four hamburgers – the works, but hold the onions – at lunch, with a couple of sides of fries thrown in. Fortunately, the room service food from The 909 was very good. The pizza had, in fact, improved over time with suggestions from Sam, who was something of an epicure when it came to pizza.
The issue with the aliens was that nobody other than Bert Mangum and Elina Stavros knew that Mangum had discovered an alien race while shipwrecked on an uninhabited – by humans, anyway – planet eleven years ago. He had kept the existence of the reclusive aliens secret, though one of them had decided to come along with Mangum when he was rescued, out of simple curiosity.
Jules was Sam’s offspring, and was only a few months old. He had not yet reached his full adult mass, though he was growing quickly.
When out among other humans, then, it was important to maintain their secret. Sam and Jules normally took on the form of golden doodle dogs, Sam full-grown and Jules a puppy. Of course, they could also impersonate humans, but it was much more work to get it right. It was usually easiest to impersonate some human they had actually met.
As for accompanying Mangum and Stavros to Marceau’s for
Anything else humans ate, Sam and Jules could eat. They could even eat humans – considered them pretty good eating, in fact – which had been very handy for Mangum when he had a body to dispose of. That happened pretty often, as Bert Mangum – and now Elina Stavros as well – was a direct-action operative for the Association Intelligence Agency, the most secretive intelligence service in the cluster.
The occasional disposal of bodies was part of that job. Mangum’s companion and assistant being a man-eating alien had therefore been convenient the last eleven years.
“Bert,” Sam said after a few minutes, “we were wondering what was next for us. Have you had any input from work? Do you have any insight into our next assignment?”
Mangum looked over to Stavros and she shook her head. He turned back to Sam.
“No, not yet, Sam. Most assignments come out of the blue. Here, go do this. We don’t really see them coming.”
“So what are you doing now?”
“Paperwork, mostly. We read reports from other agents in the field, and make note of anything that seems unusual, or for which we get some insight into what’s going on.”
“Ah. Yes, that always surprised me. On assignment, you spend a lot of time writing reports, and off assignment you spend a lot of time reading them.”
“I think there’s two motivations there, Sam. One is that headquarters thinks field operatives are more likely to see something in a report that others will miss, or have more insight into the sort of things that might be going on than a desk jockey.
“The other thing is it’s good education for how to write good field reports, to be subjected to field reports yourself.”
Sam chuckled.
“Maybe even a little vengeance there, Bert.”
Mangum laughed.
“Could be. You certainly do learn over time that some people are better at writing field reports than others. And why some are better than others. It ups your game.”
Sam nodded.
“Well, let us know when you hear anything, Bert. It’s always interesting to hear what our next trip will be about.”
Lingering Problems
Isabela Febo was reading through reports from the Association of Planets Interstellar Police. The ISP was coordinating the arrest of the illegal RDT dealers on all the planets of the Association. RDT addicts were everywhere, and every planet had its own dealer network.
The Chairman of the Association of Planets Council sighed. What a mess. She doubted Wendell Evans had been aware just how many problems he would be causing when he brought RDT into the cluster from his trip to the rest of human space twenty years ago.
Of course, it had been the income from the illicit drug trade that had made the Crossroads space station financially possible, and Crossroads was the critical element of the hub-and-spoke trading system that had resulted in twenty years of a booming economy in the cluster.
She found herself alternately blessing and cursing Wendell Evans just about every day. He had died three years ago, so she doubted it made much difference to him either way.
His son, William Evans, now ran the RDT business for the Association and the other five star nations of the cluster. The one thing they couldn’t do was shut down the RDT trade for, once addicted, people were dependent on the drug. Lack of it resulted in steadily declining cognition until the person could no longer take care of themselves. They would end up in assisted living, wards of the state.
They could even die, which might solve that part of the problem but left an even bigger one. Most RDT addicts were functioning addicts, carrying out necessary roles in society and their families.
So the six local star nations had taken over the RDT business, as a maintenance drug for current addicts. Government stores now sold the drug to addicts, and the illicit drug dealers, who had incentives to increase the addiction rate, were being put out of business. Being rounded up and convicted.
Something niggled at Febo. There was something hovering there, just at the edge of her memory. What was it? Something important. From the point in time when they had broken the whole thing open several months back.
Febo dug back through the raw reports she had demanded and received from Henry Grant, the head of the Agency. For most of the Agency’s operations, she had been content with the executive summary reports prepared for her. But not this time. This whole mess, and the government’s response to it, had been too important.
Febo dug through the operatives’ reports. It wasn’t the fellow on Crossroads, she was sure. It was the fellow who had been the Agency’s operative on Wilbourne, where the Evans Group was located. His report included the transcripts of the interviews that had been done.
Febo flipped back and forth through the interview transcripts, and there it was. The critical sequence. The thing that had poked at her memory, a few sentences in the reams of data she had gone through at the time.
“Did you not know of the harm from the drug?”
“We did, but there was a cure in the works.”
“There was a cure in the works?”
“Yes. In Earth sector.”
“So the idea at some point was to go back to get the cure?”
“Yes. After the station was built and paid off.”
“But he never went back, did he?”
“No. He became too ill to travel like that.”
“He was too ill for such a long trip?”
“Yes.”
“And Crossroads wasn’t paid off yet anyway, right?”
“Right.”
A cure!
Febo considered. A cure for RDT addiction would solve all the lingering problems of Wendell Evans’ financing plan. But it was ‘in Earth sector.’ What did that even mean?
The colonists who had set out for the globular cluster designated NGC 2808 in Earth’s early astronomy had done so to get away from the astropolitical situation closer to Earth. Earth’s colonies took massive amounts of money to establish, and the wealthy corporations and individuals who established them had near-feudal control over their populations.
Over time, and as space travel had gotten easier, those class-stratified societies had clashed, resulting in wars of conquest and forced annexations that had consolidated thousands of colonies into interstellar star kingdoms. It had been a messy business. Earth itself had been annexed into one of them.
The result had been two dozen or so star kingdoms ruled by hereditary monarchies. The nobility and the elites ran those star kingdoms for their own benefit.
Except. One such monarch, King Henry III of the Kingdom of Ardanovo, whether seeking to preserve a different method of governance or to rid his kingdom of its troublemakers, had financed and sent out eight new colonies to NGC 2808. Over thirty thousand light-years from Earth, it was a risky business. They had been years in transit, and two of those eight colonies had in fact failed.
The other six colonies had become Mardouk, Wilbourne, Gaston, Abelon, Villacqua, and Lyons. Those colonies had prospered, and founded colonies of their own, within the cluster, becoming the six star nations of the cluster today. While two of those star nations – Wilbourne and Lyons – were nominally monarchies, they were all democratic to a greater or lesser extent, with broad civil-rights guarantees and free-market economies.
These rogue colonies were orphaned by the rest of humanity. The hereditary rulers of human space wanted nothing to do with the assorted troublemakers and libertarians King Henry III had sent so far away. As far as they were concerned, even farther would have been fine.
For their part, the people of the cluster wanted little to do with the feudal kingdoms of human space. There was little traffic or trade between the cluster and the rest of humanity.
Febo checked the time, and put in a meeting request with Henry Grant, the head of the Agency. She set the time for mid-afternoon, during her scheduled nap.
Henry Grant was formally the head of the Association’s Agency for Interstellar Trade. It was located in a nondescript office building in Ashur’s sprawling suburbs. There was a Museum of Interstellar Free Trade on the ground floor that was open to the public. The Agency for Interstellar Trade was therefore uninteresting, and the public did not come.
