Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One (30 page)

“Fine. Did he have a reason to be in the receiving line? He doesn’t sound like the type of person who would want to glad-hand dignitaries.”

“Maybe it was a secret dream of his. I don’t even know if he’d ever met Kouris—”

“What was his
job
at the Summit? It doesn’t appear as though he did much of anything.”

“He was an attaché, he…got shit for us. Ran errands. Made notes, whatever.”

“How many
attachés
did you have serving you?”

“Um, four, five? I don’t…remember….” The lines had begun to deepen around his sagging eyelids. The amps were wearing off.

“Seems like a little too much bureaucratic padding to me—this isn’t the Alliance. What about the following individuals: Alice Terre, Gerald Michaels, Treyson Rivers, Brandon Chao?”

“Wha—what’s special about them?”

“They also participated in the receiving line and greeted Minister Santiagar prior to his collapse. We’ll need to review their files and activities as well.”

Michael sat at his desk, the door closed. A few moments’ respite. His hands rested at his chin in a thoughtful pose. And he
was
thoughtful.

He’d conducted half a dozen interviews at the request of his agents, spent hours reviewing summaries of three dozen more interviews and viewed the footage of the incident from every angle and the cams of the pursuing agents. He’d confirmed the logs of every exit and patrol on Atlantis.

The man in the receiving line
was
Chris Candela. Scans of both Kouris’ and Santiagar’s hands minutes after the incident recovered trace DNA. Yet the man pursued into the service corridors displayed evasion and subterfuge skills which nothing in Candela’s life history indicated he should possess.

Worse, he was
gone
. Despite an ironclad lockdown on the facility in under two minutes—due as much to quick-moving Alliance security as anyone else’s actions—and a meter-level grid search, no trace could be found of the man.

The exit logs stared back at him from the screen above his desk. Eventually they had been forced to allow the uninvolved guests and bystanders to depart. The official Summit attendees were accounted for, save Candela. The nine attendees not present at the final dinner—an Alliance staffer, three reporters and five corporate executives—were interviewed on-scene and provided viable reasons for their absence. After follow-up they had been cleared and allowed to depart as well.

He exhaled softly, feeling every gram of the weight though it didn’t show in his posture or the bearing of his shoulders. Diplomatic relations with the Alliance hung by a dangling strand of a thread. If they could provide hard evidence of this being the act of a lone crazy, they stood a chance of at least regaining an uneasy détente. Otherwise, their claims of non-involvement came off as weak and impotent. But damned if he could find any such evidence.

He traded the exit logs for the rapidly growing file on the life and times of Chris Candela.

He had seen many criminals in his years in Division. Dangerous men and even more dangerous women. Small-time hucksters and savvy crime lords. Spies, gangsters, assassins, insurgents and wannabe-revolutionaries. True believers and soulless mercs willing to kill children for the right price.

Candela was none of these things. While the possibility continued that something in the man’s past, some event they had yet to uncover would open a Pandora’s box of secrets, it became increasingly unlikely with each passing hour. Even if—

His eVi blinked red, and a second later a brief message flashed into his vision.

We found him.

The body had floated onto a beach filled with frolicking children mid-morning Atlantis time. Once the children were corralled for counseling and the scene secured, a thorough forensic investigation was conducted onsite before moving the body to a medical facility.

The examination indicated a time of death between late afternoon on Wednesday and mid-morning Thursday; two-plus days in the water made a more precise TOD impossible. The cause of death was determined to be drowning. All evidence indicated that upon escaping the convention facility, however he accomplished it, he had simply dived off a walkway and let himself drown.

Oceans did not constitute a significant feature of Senecan topology. They existed of course, but were shallow and unexceptional, and generally far too cold to frolic in. It was conceivable Candela didn’t know how to swim. Unlikely, but conceivable.

It remained a mystery how he escaped the lockdown. But he clearly had—after which, by all indications, he committed suicide.

The evidence at this point was near to irrefutable. And despite herculean efforts and their most earnest protestations, they had nothing they would be able to show to the Alliance government to prove the assassination was anything other than a premeditated act on behalf of the Senecan Federation.

25

PALLUDA

S
ENECAN
F
EDERATION
C
OLONY

T
HAD
Y
UE LED THE FIGHTERS
into Senecan Federation space. He had swung down a bit to the south so should they be tracked, they would appear to be approaching from the nearest Alliance military base on Arcadia. They were unlikely to be picked up until they reached Palluda however, as other than one tiny Alliance colony the region to the south of western Federation space was a desolate wasteland devoid of life.

At 0.2 AU out from Palluda they dropped out of superluminal. He signaled the other fighters to move into a tight standard Alliance approach formation, one they had practiced several times in the last week in the skies above Cosenti.

From here on out, everything needed to proceed according to the script.

“Activate transponders.”

Acknowledged.

“Switching to Alliance encrypted communications protocol. Confirm.”

Confirmed.

He consciously added a crisp abruptness to his tone. “This is Vengeance Alpha. Operation Vengeance is a go. Initiate jamming of orbital sensors on my mark. And…mark.”

Palluda became visible in the viewport moments later. It was a smallish planet, two-thirds the size of Mars, and the lone habitable world in the system. Nevertheless with a location solidly in the goldilocks zone and a stable orbit, it was a bountiful if ordinary garden world.

The colony had been founded ten years earlier as an agricultural outpost. It supported a population of under thirty thousand, for bots did most of the work tending the vast kilometers of farmland. A single town sat in the center of the cultivated land. Thankfully the first atmosphere corridors had begun operation six months earlier—corridors which helpfully included transponder monitoring, though no connected security measures.

“Bravo, Charlie, Delta, on me. Prepare for corridor transit.”

The corridor ended to the southwest of and outside town. Only the most basic defense system protected the colony, consisting of two surface-to-air turret lasers and a single patrol drone. He planned to knock out the drone immediately, and custom jamming ware would disrupt the STA turrets.

His ship emerged from the corridor and the distant outline of the town came into view. The other three fighters followed him out as he banked east.

“Vengeance, you have your targets. We are weapons heavy.”

Thomas Harnal was deeply engrossed in watching Ava Loumas saunter across the street. As such, he didn’t see the patrol drone until it crashed to the ground three meters in front of him.

“Ah shit!” His arms cartwheeled in the air as he was thrown backward to land on his ass on the sidewalk. He looked up to discover Ava staring wide-eyed at the scattered wreckage of the drone and the deep crater it had created.

He laughed gamely and climbed to his feet. “Well, there’s my brush with death for the day, eh?”

She glanced over at him, a perplexed frown animating her pretty features. “Oh…Norm…Tom? That’s your name, right? Are you okay?”

She didn’t even know his name.
His shoulders sagged. “Yeah, I’m fine.” He looked back at the crater marring the park grass. “I wonder what happened to make it fail? Maybe the—”

A sonic boom reverberated, so close the ground trembled beneath him. His eyes jerked up to see two fighter jets zoom overhead. The distinctive navy Earth Alliance emblem was clearly discernable—they were flying
that
low.

He hated the Alliance. Alliance soldiers killed his grandfather in the Crux War. He had never met his grandfather, but his mom said he had been a great man, which was good enough for him.

A fireball plumed into the sky from the vicinity of the spaceport. Three seconds later the sound of the explosion reached them, a low rumble vibrating along his skin as it built to a malicious
growl
.

In a burst of adrenaline-fueled bravery, he grabbed Ava’s hand and started sprinting in the direction of the town hall. His dad worked for the Agriculture Bureau; he should be there if he wasn’t on his lunch break.

“Come on! We have to warn them the Alliance is attacking!”

Gerald Harnal sat at his desk, picking at a sandwich while he reviewed the quarterly production reports. The whole-grain hybrid fields were doing really well, which was fortunate since the food corps on Krysk were requesting an increase in shipments next quarter.

No matter how smart, how fast or how resilient humanity grew, they still needed food to survive. Sure, using adaptive cybernetic subroutines most people could now survive longer without food, so long as they had water. But the limit had only been stretched to four months at the outside, and no one wanted to live in such a state for
any
length of time, much less months.

So the seeds to feed humanity continued to be planted, nourished, reaped and transported across the galaxy.