Silent Order_Fire Hand Read online

  A plastic table stood near the doors twenty meters away, and five men huddled around it, staring at maps of the station. March recognized Michael Tank at once. He was middle-aged and growing an impressive paunch, but he had the thick arms of a man accustomed to both manual labor and violence. His face was hard and grim, and his finger jabbed like a knife as he pointed at locations on the map. The other four men were younger and nodded as Tank spoke.

  The illumination in the cargo bay was not good, with only a row of lights running down the center of the ceiling. That threw thick shadows along the walls, and Tank and the rest of the Machinist cell stood in the center of one of the pools of light. That would have ruined their night vision, and they would not be able to see in the deep shadows.

  March glided along the circumference of the walls, his training as an Iron Hand allowing him to move in perfect silence. As he moved, he reached to his belt and drew out a stunner, a blocky weapon that looked something like an oversized tape measure attached to a pistol grip. It only had an effective range of four or five meters, but within that range, it could knock a man out for a solid five minutes.

  He moved forward in silence, the stunner held ready in his right hand, his left hand curled into a fist of metal.

  “Once the bombs have gone off, we’ll wait a week,” said Tank, gesturing over the map. March saw the bombs next to him. The Machinists had provided Tank with four molecular-detonator bombs, squat metal cylinders about eighteen inches across. The devices consumed themselves entirely in their explosions, leaving no trace behind, and they were a favorite tool of both the Iron Hands and Machinists cells. “Then we’ll send an anonymous message taking responsibility to the administrators.” He smiled. “They’ll have no choice but to supply the next Machinist smuggler ship that comes to the station. And when they do, we’ll get our rewards from the Final Consciousness. We’ll never grow old or sick, and we’ll live forever.” He sneered. “The Calaskaran Royal Church says that all who repent and believe will live forever after death, but the Final Consciousness can actually do it. Now. Any questions?” He frowned. “Who the hell are you?”

  March stopped a few meters away, raised the stunner, and fired.

  It hit the nearest man, a greasy-looking fellow in a stained technician’s coverall, and the man collapsed to the ground. Before the others could react, March shifted aim and fired again, and a second would-be Machinist collapsed motionless to the ground.

  One of the men charged towards March, and a second yanked a pistol from his belt and fired. March reacted with haste, grabbing the charging man with his left hand and twisting him around, so he caught the plasma bolt in the upper thigh. The stench of burning flesh filled March’s nostrils, and he shoved the wounded man away as the gunman tried to line up another shot. March’s left hand closed around the pistol and squeezed, crushing the weapon and shattering the gunman’s hand. The man screamed in agony, and March drove a hammer fist into the side of his head, sending him senseless to the floor.

  Michael Tank roared and attacked, swinging a heavy wrench as easily as if it were a pen. March raised his left arm, catching the descending wrench on his forearm. His cybernetic arm absorbed the impact without difficulty, but the shock of the blow still went all the way into his shoulder. Tank blinked in surprise. The wrench ought to have shattered the bones of March’s forearms like glass. March threw a punch at Tank’s face, but the big man reacted with surprising speed, dodging around the blow and yanking a knife from his belt.

  The blade blurred at March’s face, and he had to jump back, trying to get the stunner in line for another shot. Tank’s next slash almost reached March’s face, and he shifted his stance. A wild grin went over Tank’s face as he reversed the grip on his knife and brought it hammering down towards March’s chest.

  March caught the blade in his left hand and squeezed, crushing the weapon.

  Tank’s eyes went wide. “What are you?”

  March jammed the stunner against Tank’s jaw and squeezed the trigger.

  The big man fell over and hit the table, knocking it over and sending the maps scattering to the floor. The man who had been wounded with the plasma bolt groaned in agony. March considered the wound, decided that it probably wouldn’t kill him, and gave the man a dose of the stunner. Just be on the safe side, he walked around the unconscious men, and gave them each another blast.

  Once that was done, he drew a roll of engine tape from his coat and went to work. Layers of tape secured their wrists and ankles together in thick bonds, and then he sealed their mouths shut for good measure. After he had them bound, he used the last of the charge in his stunner to give them each another jolt.

  March pocketed the stunner, made sure the cargo bay’s main entrance was locked from inside, and then headed back to the access panel. He paused long enough to make sure that he had left no traces behind and that each member of the Machinist cell had been dragged far enough away from the others that they couldn’t help each other escape. In another twenty or thirty minutes, they would start waking up with nasty headaches and a bad case of vertigo, and once those cleared, they would start trying to escape.

  In another hour, March would make sure the entire cell would either be executed or spend the rest of their natural lives doing hard labor on a penal colony.

  Huh. It seemed that March hadn’t needed to kill anyone after all. That ought to please Censor. The Machinist collaborators liked to think of themselves as participating in the next wave of human evolution as they bombed schools and hospitals and blew up starliners. Seeing a group of them on trial for a comically inept terrorist plot ought to drain some of the glamour away.

  He exited through the access panel, fastening it back into place behind him, and set off through the service corridors. A few moments later he found a ladder and climbed it to the public levels of the station. March stepped onto a busy docking concourse, drones laden with cargo rolling past, while technicians and freighter crewers walked back and forth. He strode through their midst until he came to the docking bay that held his ship.

  The Tiger awaited him.

  March’s ship was a light freighter, specifically a Class 9 light freighter built by Mercator Foundry Yards, the sort of ship called a “blockade runner” and favored by independent traders, privateers, and frequently pirates. The Tiger was a sleek seventy-five meters long and designed for a crew of six, though March flew her alone with the aid of the ship’s computer pseudointelligence. He had upgraded the reactors and the thrust-to-mass ratio significantly and had added heavy armaments – four forward-facing plasma cannons, a dorsal and a ventral laser turret, and a keel-mounted railgun rated for use on light capital warships.

  The armaments had cost a lot of money, but given that March’s work for the Silent Order took him to the wild systems beyond the control of the Kingdom of Calaskar, they had proven their worth again and again.

  He unlocked the cargo airlock, passed through the cargo bay, and headed down the ship’s dorsal corridor, past the galley, the crew cabins, the infirmary, and the gym. The dorsal corridor ended in the flight cabin, which had room for four crewers. March took the pilot’s acceleration chair and powered up the displays. Flatscreens came to life around him, and blue holograms flared into existence.

  “Good evening, Captain March,” said a woman’s voice, speaking with the cool accent of a Calaskaran noblewoman.

  “Good evening, Vigil,” said March. The computer interface was a pseudointelligence, not quite a true artificial intelligence. True AIs invariably went insane, a fact that March had seen with his own eyes. Vigil could do practically anything except engage in self-aware thought. “Preflight status?”

  “Checklists running,” said Vigil.

  “Do we still have a flight window from station control?” said March.

  “In thirteen minutes,” said Vigil.

  “Good,” said March.

  He went through some of the checklists himself, running preflight diagnostics on the fusion reactor, the
ion thrusters, the dark matter reactor, and the hyperdrive. Everything came up green. Adhemar Station had a first-class spaceport, which was just as well because the Tiger had needed maintenance and upgrades. Quality facilities were hard to find in the outer systems and in the border areas between the major interstellar powers.

  One by one, the Tiger’s systems passed the preflight checks. The technicians and mechanics of Adhemar Station did good work.

  At least those who hadn’t joined covert Machinist cells, anyway.

  All systems flashed green, and March did a final check. Thirty seconds later, he received permission to depart from spaceport control, and he fired the ion thrusters and eased the Tiger out of the bay and into the darkness of space. Some of the displays lit up with visual views of the asteroid and the surrounding star fields. This far out into the system, the star of the Antioch system seemed only like a small disk, little bigger than a coin. March plotted a course for Antioch Station itself, the chief space installation of the system, and joined the queue of ships departing from Adhemar Station in an orderly line.

  As he did, he brought up the controls for the Tiger’s communication system, which was standard for a ship of the Tiger’s class, and the controls for the anonymizer, which was not. Once the anonymizer was online, March made a call to the station’s security center. Rather than a contingent of Marines from Navy or Royal Army troops provided by the Ministry of Defense, Adhemar Station’s security needs were provided by Cuirass Corporation, a private mercenary contractor staffed exclusively by veterans of the Calaskaran armed forces. March had quietly investigated the local Cuirass officers and concluded that they would be reliable enough to do what he needed.

  Once the connection had been made, March sent the data. He had gathered a large amount of information on the Machinist cell, and he sent it all to station security, along with a report that the Machinists had been overpowered and left tied up in Cargo Bay 87 and the hydroponics control room. After the last of information had been sent, March activated the software tap he had left in the security office’s communication system and waited, listening to the activity on the channels.

  He did not need to wait long.

  Within twenty minutes, officers of the Cuirass Corporation had stormed Cargo Bay 87 and taken all five Machinist sympathizers into custody, along with an additional man tied up in a locker beneath one of the hydroponics domes. March had not exactly followed strict rules of evidence collection while conducting his surveillance, but that didn’t matter. Between what Cuirass Corporation had found and what March had sent them, the evidence against Tank and his band of would-be revolutionaries was so overwhelming that it would end in either execution or a penal colony.

  March’s work here was done.

  He adjusted the Tiger’s course and fed power to the dark matter reactor, preparing a hyperjump for the inner system and Antioch Station.

  Chapter 2: Censor

  A few hours and one hyperjump later, the Tiger came within visual range of Antioch Station.

  Vigil alerted him in the ship’s gym. “Captain March, Antioch Station is coming within communication range.”

  March grunted and set the barbell back onto the rack, sweat streaming down his face and chest. He rose from the bench, straining in the increased gravity of the gym. “Acknowledged.”

  “Instructions?” said Vigil.

  “First set the gravity back to normal,” said March.

  “Adjusting gravity level,” said Vigil. There was a humming sound, and the gravity in the gym went from one hundred and fifty percent normal to standard one-G. March caught his balance, breathing hard as his body adjusted its reduced weight. After weight training in augmented gravity, walking around at normal one-G felt like flying.

  Which was the point, of course. His cybernetic left arm had inhuman strength, but he needed to keep the rest of his body strong. March picked up a bottle of water and drained half of it in three gulps, then grabbed a towel and wiped off his face and chest.

  “All right,” he said. “Antioch Station. Request an approach vector and a docking slot. I’ll be up to talk to station control in a few minutes.”

  “Acknowledged, Captain March,” said Vigil.

  March finished off his water bottle and turned for the door, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror as he passed.

  As always, the sight gave him pause.

  His right arm and torso were heavy with muscle, thanks to both years of training and these high-G exercise sessions. His left arm was metal, but his shoulder was a mixture of metal and flesh and bone, the skin where the metal arm joined his flesh gnarled with old scars. A larger Y-shaped scar went down both sides of his chest and then his stomach, stopping an inch or so below his navel. He had seen enough dead men to know that autopsied corpses had the same scar upon their torsos.

  He had been an Iron Hand, one of the elite assassins and commandos of the Final Consciousness. Once upon a time, he would have helped those would-be terrorists on Adhemar Station, the certainty of the cybernetic hive mind thundering through his thoughts.

  He had left the Final Consciousness behind and now fought against the Machinists.

  But the scars would always remind him of what he had been.

  He hated looking at his reflection.

  March grimaced and left to the gym. He went to his cabin, stripped off his sweat-stained exercise pants, and cleaned himself in the sanitizer booth. A shower would have been pleasant, but on a starship water was a precious resource, one that could not be wasted on such luxuries. Besides, the sanitizer was probably more effective, though it certainly didn’t feel as enjoyable. Once he had finished, March dressed in his usual shipboard jumpsuit, putting a gun belt around his waist and clipping a breath mask to his belt out of habit.

  A few minutes later, he opened the door to the flight cabin and dropped into the pilot’s acceleration chair, the flatscreens and the holographic displays coming to life around him.

  Some of the screens showed Antioch Station itself.

  No matter how many times he saw it, the huge station was an impressive sight. Five concentric rings of gleaming metal made up the station, the largest nearly five kilometers in diameter. Racks of solar panels rose from the rings, and the Tiger’s sensors detected hundreds of ships of varying size docked there. The sensors picked up powerful weapon systems, and also two Calaskaran Royal Navy heavy cruisers patrolling around the station’s defense perimeter. The defenses had been upgraded since March’s last visit. Likely the Royal Navy had improved the defenses in response to the destruction of the Covenant at Tamlin’s World and the disaster with the Alpine.

  March accepted an incoming communication from the station and spent a few minutes speaking with the well-scrubbed young officer of the Royal Calaskaran Navy in charge of traffic control. He declared his cargo (a load of zero-g manufactured electronic components from Adhemar Station) and transmitted his ID and ship registry. They were all legitimate, and while March might have been an Alpha Operative of the Silent Order, he nonetheless had an actual privateer’s letter of marque from the Crown of Calaskar. The Silent Order believed in maintaining a plausible cover story whenever possible, and nothing was more plausible than the truth.

  Once his information was cleared, the Tiger was assigned a docking port on the outer ring. March used the ship’s ion thrusters to maneuver the cargo airlock to the docking port, and after a few moments of careful adjustments, the Tiger docked with the station. He spent a half hour speaking with the office of the cargo master, arranging for the drones to pick up the ship’s cargo and carry it to its next point of transit. March wouldn’t make much money from ferrying the components from Adhemar Station to Antioch Station, but it would be enough to pay his costs from the last month of spying on Machinist sympathizers.

  The cargo master assigned him an unloading time in five hours. March confirmed it and set the ship’s systems to standby, and left the Tiger for the docking ring. The corridor was crowded, with both drones and unif
ormed cargo handlers unloading ships. March could have hired a taxi for a ride, but he felt the need to stretch his legs, and he had five hours to kill.

  That meant he had time to take a phone call…and eat a good meal while he waited.

  Twenty minutes and a few lift rides later, March walked onto one of the commercial concourses of the station’s inner ring. It looked like a massive three-story mall with wide balconies running along the wall. Most of the businesses catered towards the crews of the ships that came and went from Antioch Station – repairs, supplies, upgrades, weapons, and restaurants. Flatscreens stationed here and there showed films from the Ministry of Information, most of them highlighting the various atrocities and war crimes that the Final Consciousness had committed on its rampages through the galaxy. A church of the Royal Calaskaran Church occupied a large section of the concourse, and despite the time of the day, there were many worshippers. March knew that there was a well-regulated and licensed brothel tucked away on the station, but it always bemused him that the church had more visitors than the brothel. The Calaskarans took their religion seriously, which was perhaps why they had resisted the Final Consciousness for so long while many other human interstellar nations had been conquered.

  March ignored both the church and the brothel, and instead went to Mallister’s, his favorite restaurant on Antioch Station. Nobles and officers of the Calaskaran Royal Navy preferred to dine at establishments on the higher balcony levels. Mallister’s was not their kind of place, and it catered to enlisted men and freighter crewers. It was next to a shop that sold refurbished life-support equipment on the lowest balcony level. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke, the filters in the ceiling giving off a loud whine as they struggled to keep up. Crewers and enlisted men sat at the tables, eating and drinking and laughing as they played cards.

  March ordered his usual of bacon, eggs, and coffee from the bartender, and he seated himself in a booth and placed his phone on the table. A few moments later a pretty waitress brought him a tray with his breakfast. March thanked her and started eating. The bacon and eggs, of course, were vat-grown. He supposed it was odd that he preferred the taste of vat-grown meat to the real thing. Then again, he had grown up eating the protein paste the Machinists provided for the workers in their labor camps, and he hadn’t tasted even vat-grown meat until he had received the special privileges accorded to the Iron Hands.