Authors: Victor Gischler
“Come with us, Mr. Sloan. Our orders are to evac you to a safe location, where details of your situation will be revealed.”
I stood, legs still wobbly. “I’ll come, but don’t expect me to set any land speed records.”
I followed them through the cryo labs, but my knees gave out in the lobby. A pair of thugs flanked me, hoisting me up under the arms. The toes of my hospital slippers made drag marks in the dust as they dragged me down a long hallway toward the exit.
Dust?
I noticed it now. The outer rooms were a wreck—dust and cobwebs on the light fixtures, tarps thrown over furniture.
“This place was mothballed?”
“The rebels brought this facility back online specifically to resurrect you,” the captain said.
“I’m flattered.”
We took a service elevator up to the surface. When we came out of the dome that covered the entrance to the agency cryo facility, I gasped. The huge industrial complex surrounding the agency bunker had been flattened, and not recently. Rubble piled up all around us, rusted girders like the ancient bones of some gigantic tortured animal rising into the air. In the hazy distance, the capitol building looked like some hulking titan had taken a bite out of it. The sky was smoky and gray, the sun struggling to shine light through the thick haze.
What the hell has happened?
The captain must have read my mind. “DC was nuked. Along with New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston, Paris, London, Moscow, Cairo—too many to list. Earth was finished fifty years ago. Our capital is Mars now. We hold most of the solar system, although the rebels have bases on a couple of Jupiter’s moons. Their big strongholds are out of the system.”
“Out of the system?” They’d only begun to colonize out-system when I’d last been sent back into deep freeze.
“Translight tech made a huge leap a hundred years ago,” the captain said. “We’ve got a human presence on nearly four hundred worlds. Earth was on its way to being old news even before the nukes fell. There are still a number of functioning cities, and some good natural resources left to be exploited, but the hub of all empire activity is on Mars now.”
The roar of anti-grav generators drowned out my next question as the armored transport touched down forty yards away, kicking up dust and debris. The gangplank slammed down and a dozen armored troopers spilled out and formed a perimeter to cover us as we boarded, but no enemies showed up to laser us into ash.
Once aboard, they strapped me in across from an official-looking guy in a green suit. His tie and shirt were different shades of green, green glitter down the center of the tie. He smiled at me perfunctorily before turning to the captain.
“Captain, make sure the pilot is following the evac plan we discussed,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” The captain left for the cockpit.
I felt the ship shudder as we lifted off.
“Good to meet you, Mr. Sloan,” the man in the green suit said. “I’m Agent Armand with Empire Internal Security.”
“Secret police,” I said.
Armand smiled vaguely, then shrugged. “It’s a paycheck.”
“Is this where I find out what’s going on, or do we do some more cloak and dagger bullshit first?”
“What did the first man tell you?” Armand asked. “I’ll pick it up from there.”
I told him, how I’d been selected to infiltrate a naturalist cult, the whole shooting match. I related the conversation word for word. Operatives have good recall. It’s part of the job.
“What he told you is essentially true,” Armand said.
“Why did he shoot himself?”
“To avoid torture, I’d imagine. As a high-level rebel agent, he likely had valuable information.”
“You would have tortured him?”
“Absolutely,” Armand said. “I mean, not me personally, but, yes, we would have knocked the shit out of him pretty good.”
“What about me?”
“That depends on what the captain tells me,” Armand said. “Ah, here he is now. Captain?”
“It went just as planned,” the captain told Armand. “The pilot reports that he jammed a rebel distress signal before it left orbit. Under intense interrogation, one of the rebel lab techs gave up an identification code. We used it to transmit a message which was accepted by the rebel base on Europa. In short, the rebels believe their attempt to extract Mr. Sloan has been successful.”
“Excellent, Captain.” Armand rubbed his hands together, a smile of genuine satisfaction on his ruddy puss. “Please pass along my compliments to all involved.”
The captain bowed, clicked his heels and excused himself.
Armand beamed at me. “We’re in the perfect position to insert you undercover into the naturalist cult, except now you will act on behalf of the
legitimate
galactic government, instead of for the rebels.”
“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do,” I said, “for any government.”
“All of that will be revealed in due time,” Armand assured me. “What the rebel agent told you was true. One of our modern operatives would be detected in an instant. That’s why they raided the mothballed facility and brought you out of stasis. Stay patient. We’ll fill you in on the details. We’ll equip you and support you in every possible way to make sure your mission is a success. All we need to know at this moment, Mr. Sloan, is if you are still ready and willing to serve the Third Reich.”
“Of course,” I said.
Sieg heil, baby.
T
he ship docked with the imperial frigate
Rommel
, which was waiting for us in orbit.
I spent most of the nine-hour trip to Mars in the accelerated gym, working the kinks out of my muscles and getting my reflexes back. An hour at the gun range with slug-throwers and laser weapons confirmed that my hand–eye coordination was in order. I injured three troopers in a hand-to-hand refresher. No problems.
I dressed myself in a new gray suit for my briefing with Armand, a small, tasteful swastika pin on the lapel. Reluctantly, I wore a thin black tie with red glitter down the middle.
When in Rome.
Except Rome had been nuked to shit decades ago.
The door to the formal dining parlor spiraled open, and I entered. Armand sat at the far end of a highly polished wooden table, a crystal goblet at his elbow, a plate of something leafy in front of him. Behind him a huge red banner with a swastika in the middle hung floor to ceiling.
“You’re doing well, I take it?” he asked.
“I’m better. The effects of being in deep freeze so long were pretty severe. I don’t plan on going back in that long again. Or ever,” I growled.
“You might change your mind if you do any traveling. They use cryo-sleep for journeys into deep space,” Armand said. “It takes three or four years at maximum translight to reach some of the outer colonies. We’ve been discovering wormholes, and those take us really far really fast, but there are still sectors of space where a long translight flight is the only option.”
I shrugged. Humanity hadn’t made it that far out into the galaxy when I was put into stasis. I’d cross that bridge if I ever came to it.
Armand gestured for me to take a seat next to him, and I did. He held up a packet in a thin, hard plastic container and slid it across the table to me. The flap was sealed with hardened red wax, the imperial seal imprinted in it, a complicated combination of the swastika and an eagle clutching swords with stars in the background. It all looked a little too busy to me.
I put a hand on the packet. “What’s this?”
“Your brief,” Armand said. “Don’t open it here. You’re scheduled to take a commercial shuttle to St. Armstrong on Luna, where you’ll catch a deep-space flight out of the system. The rest comes from higher up the food chain, and is for your eyes only.”
“Why can’t I take a direct flight from Mars?”
“Anything directly from Mars will be suspicious to the rebels,” he explained. “St. Armstrong became an independent city-state just after the big war, and nobody was strong enough to keep it from happening. As it turns out, it’s useful to have some neutral ground in the system. The rebels think their agents have you secure. In order to maintain that illusion, we need to ship you out from the moon.”
“Right.” I stood, tucked the packet under my arm. “Guess I’d better dig into this and orient myself.”
“One last word of caution,” Armand said. “Using an operative of your type and caliber is more than simply a matter of convenience. Once you’re out there, you’re on your own. We’ll be able to support you at the right time, but for the most part you’ll be dependent upon your own cunning and resources. So stay sharp.”
“Sharp is my middle name.”
I flipped Armand a salute and made my way back to my cabin. The ship would dock at the orbiting terminal around Mars soon, and once there I’d only have twenty-eight minutes to make my connection back to Luna. Not time enough to get a solid fix on the packet’s contents, but I opened it anyway to at least get a first impression.
There was a digi-reader loaded with data. Tucked into the inside flap of the packet were three passports. One identified me as Carter Sloan, the other two alternate identities. There was a short, typed note tucked into one of the alternate passports.
You will travel in disguise to Luna. Find your clothing in the closet.
I opened the closet and saw the Catholic priest’s outfit hanging there, new and perfectly pressed. I put it on, and it fit perfectly. Black pants and shirt, black jacket, even the white collar. At least I didn’t have to wear some bullshit glitter tie. Sitting on the floor was a light bag with a change of clothes and various sundries.
There was a slight bump, and the captain announced over the loudspeaker that the
Rommel
had docked. I slung the bag over my shoulder, grabbed the brief packet, and left my cabin. Nobody wished me well or even looked at me as I disembarked. I was the nowhere man, the human nothing. I never existed. Blink and I’m gone.
Such is the life of an undercover operative.
I caught a glimpse of Mars as I passed an observation lounge. Clusters of city lights blinked in sprawling patches, connected by crisscrossing rail lines. A thriving modern world. It would have been nice to visit, but duty called.
I made the PanGalactic Spaceways flight with three minutes to spare and a stewardess with
Heidi
etched on her name tag showed me to my seat. She was blonde and big in that athletic way that made me ache a little. I hadn’t been laid in a quarter of a millennium.
I pushed those thoughts away, to be dealt with later.
The digi-reader hummed to life after two thumbprints, a retinal scan, and voice recognition. It was interactive, which meant I could ask it questions, but that necessitated some privacy. Fortunately, the empire had sprung for a first-class seat, which meant I could fold myself into a privacy bubble. I was sure there was elaborate eavesdropping equipment that could penetrate the casual security any commercial spaceliner could offer, but the digi-reader assured me it would shut down automatically if it detected spying.
There was a list of both rebel and imperial contacts on St. Armstrong and elsewhere, which explained the high security. I literally held the lives of a dozen people in the palm of my hand.
Then I sat back and let the briefing wash over me. The players, the stakes, the details that filled in the gaps. I asked pertinent questions and got good answers. This reader was state of the art.
The new information needed to be sorted and absorbed. I told my brain to sleep, so I could let my subconscious step in. You don’t toss and turn when you’re an operative like me. You tell your brain to sleep and it happens. You wake up when you tell your brain that it’s time. This sort of thing is achieved through advanced bio-engineering, tempered with a good dose of strict mental discipline. The logic centers of the brain could perform miracles of analysis if I stepped back and let my subconscious do the heavy lifting.
* * *
Six hours later my eyes popped open with no additional insight that was relevant to the mission. It was apparently as simple and straightforward as it seemed, so there was no good reason to complicate things.
It all boiled down to whether or not I was supposed to kill the girl.
S
he was known as the daughter of the Brass Dragon.
When the Reich originally settled Mars, the planet was divided into three sectors, each ruled by one of the emperor’s marshals. The three marshals tamed the new world, reshaped it according to the desires of the emperor. The marshals brooked no impediment to the building of the new Reich home world. The emperor granted them recognition for this accomplishment and dubbed them the Three Dragons. These became hereditary titles, handed down through generations—the Gold Dragon, the Silver Dragon, and the Diamond Dragon.
There was another man without whom the Reich would never have tamed Mars. The head of Reich Gestapo, Joseph Heintz, ordered the deaths of more than a thousand men in a three-year period.
Since that time, labor problems corrected themselves immediately when his name was mentioned. Opposing political factions vanished mysteriously. Joseph Heintz made problems go away in the fastest, most direct possible way. The machinery which built the Reich home world was oiled with the blood he’d spilled. The emperor dubbed Heintz “the Brass Dragon.”
A century later, Heintz’s descendants would lead a bloody rebellion against the Reich.
“Why am I disguised as a priest?” I asked the digi-reader.
“Most of the major galactic factions respect Vatican Five’s diplomatic credentials,” the reader said. “As a Jesuit Corps operative, you will likely be allowed more extensive security clearances, and more leeway with local law enforcement.”
Jesuit Corps.
Vatican secret police. The empire thought of everything, and the Vatican home world was far enough away that nobody would really have time to check me out. As a Jesuit I could claim to be rounding up runaway clergy. Suddenly I knew what was in the packet’s other flap.
I opened it and found the little beamer. It wasn’t much of a gun, but about the only thing that would fit in the packet. I stashed it in my coat pocket.