“I don’t think anybody’s home,” Gresham said under his breath as he followed her into the heart of the warehouse. Stacked crates lined the walls and were arranged in a clear rectangular pattern in the middle of the floor.
“Don’t be so sure,” Lara replied, raising a finger to her lips. She approached a solitary crate next to a pile that was five-high and opened it. A smirk played across her lips and she motioned for Gresham to approach.
“Alright, military man, can you identify these for me?”
Gresham peered into the crate to see a series of purplish carbines. He picked one up and peered down its smooth, curved, and very alien barrel.
“That’s a briling Oan-40,” he replied. “The Dominion’s armed forces have been phasing them out in favor of the modern Oan-50 over the past four years. These tend to wind up in Border Worlds because they’re cheap and are compatible with plasma cartridges for other weapons.”
He primed it with gusto, and the bottom of the carbine glowed blue. “It’s loaded, too. These smugglers must be idiots to put live plasma packs in Oan-40s in a box. Imagine if these overheated and all the guns went off simultaneously on a flight?”
“Or,” Lara corrected, “what if they leave the guns out so they can see the carbine’s glow in the dark in case somebody breaks in?”
A bullet ricocheted off of a crate only an inch from Gresham’s head to accentuate her point. “Shit!” he cried and dove for cover, still clutching the carbine. “Where are they shooting from? Where are they?”
HV rounds and plasma beams were suddenly hurtling through the warehouse, giving a strange, brief luminescence to the space with every shot. Gresham ducked down to a crouch, trying to see which direction the shots were coming from. The zip of the HV and the phew of the plasma, intercut with the louder bangs from Lara and Troy’s pistols, drowned out his thoughts.
He finally got a visual on the source of several high-frequency plasma shots from an upper level. He aimed his carbine carefully and fired – he was rewarded with a yelp of pain and two barks of surprise. It sounded like a brogg.
“I got one!” he cried out in the direction he believed Troy was in.
“Good for you!”
You’ll thank me later, Gresham thought grudgingly and scanned the room once more for enemies. In the darkness he could barely see anything – but from a momentary flash of a plasma round, he made out a breaker box on a far wall.
Gresham ducked his head and ran full tilt towards the box. Something ricocheted off the ground behind him and he ducked as hot debris flew past his head. Lara cried something out through the din.
The breakers were all, predictably, switched off. Gresham began flipping them with gusto and the lights of the warehouse hummed to life. He looked upwards towards the catwalks. There were no more than six or seven smugglers scattered around in the elevated position, but they still had a clear advantage in numbers and altitude.
“Good work Major!” Troy yelled as he aimed and took down a large, unsavory-looking Mingiclorian. “Try to find a way up to the second floor!”
Gresham hurried along the wall, bullets and plasma still hissing through the air around him. Near the far end of the wall was a small stairwell that wound up towards the second floor. He dove into it and immediately regretted it as a plasma round slashed through a metal stair three feet away.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed in surprise and rolled down the stairs as another beam seared the wall. A Balgoshan stood at the top of the stairs, training a plasma rifle straight at his face.
Gresham’s instincts kicked in and his already-drawn gun discharged twice. Both bullets hit the Balgoshan, who toppled back against the wall in a haze of bluish blood.
It did not take a thorough investigation to see that the alien was dead. Gresham kicked the plasma rifle away regardless for good measure and glanced out onto the tresses of the second level. A nearby brogg noticed him but did not have time to swing his weapon around. Lara placed a perfect shot in the smuggler’s throat from the bottom floor and the canine ET slammed into the wall, coughing and clawing at the mortal wound.
“Thanks!” Gresham cried out. There was a loud blare and one of the windows on the third level burst, raining reinforced glass down on the warehouse. A second window shattered as well and two medium-glare flares zipped in through the openings.
“This is the Los Angeles Police! Cease fire immediately!” a voice cried through a loudspeaker. The whine of an LAPD cruiser hovering above the warehouse reached such a high pitch that Gresham had to retreat back into the stairwell and cover his ears.
Uniformed officers in full combat gear stormed into the warehouse on the lower level and four rappelled in through the broken windows. The remaining smugglers tossed their guns aside and raised their hands in defeat.
That’s right, Gresham thought with a grin. He looked down towards Lara to see that, for the first time, she was smiling too.
#
“You know how to read Balgoshan, Major Gresham?” Lara asked as she rifled through paperwork in the tiny, tucked-away office no bigger than a closet.
“Not a tongue I ever practiced,” Gresham chuckled. “Always found Krokam and Brili to be more applicable languages in my field.”
Lara motioned for an LAPD officer to approach. “Go ahead and take these files and submit them to evidence for now, there’s nothing in here we need at the moment.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the officer replied and picked up the box. “We’ll have them transferred to the materials department so that SIS can pick them up tomorrow or the day after if anything comes up.”
“Thank you, officer,” Lara said before turning her attention back to Gresham. “Those files were all in Balgoshan. For now, worthless, until we find an interpreter. Besides, Cray’ll have Level One placed on everything we find here once he wakes up, so we need to find something useful before we ship the whole lot off with the police.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
“Manifests, blueprints, ledgers, anything we can use to tie Lugrash to an Allied official, or to anyone for that matter. This was a bigger find than I was expecting, to be honest. If the dates on some of these files are correct, we’re looking at a decade of smuggling records.” Lara grinned. “Not to mention, he had cutting-edge equipment in the back for wiping the digital serial codes from guns. This is the biggest trove of evidence we’ve found in years! Oh, if only Brighton were alive…”
“I’m sure Vance would be thrilled too,” Gresham muttered and started sifting through a stack of papers, all in Balgoshan. “Lugrash must have figured it safest to write in his native language since barely any humans speak it.”
“That’s pretty much the norm for most Zone criminals,” Lara said while trying to start up the office’s database. “They operate with a paper trail so it can’t be hacked and write it in their native language, sometimes even obscure regional dialects of the language, so that it takes us longer to translate and analyze. You don’t suppose there’s an automatic translation system on this computer, do you?”
“Do you really think he has anything on there?”
“Worth a check. Besides, Cray will wipe the hard-drive once he’s downloaded everything. We need hard evidence this way.”
Gresham nodded and continued going through another box of paperwork. “I get the sense you don’t really like your boss.”
“Cray? Who the hell would? Have you ever met the man?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Let’s hope you never have to.” Lara smiled and pulled a small disk out of her pocket. “Perfect. I have access to his databank right now. I’ll download it all onto this disk and we can read all this information later.” She put it into the computer. There was a whirring noise as the download initiated.
She briefly returned her attention to Gresham. “By the way, I don’t think I complimented you yet on your shooting earlier… if you hadn’t gotten those lights on, we were all toast.”
??
?Thank Los Angeles’s finest,” Gresham replied and cracked a smile. “I don’t think those lights would have done us much good regardless had they not shown up.”
“It’s a shame you had to shoot Lugrash, though.”
“It was me or him.”
“I know. I would have done the same. Still, he would have been useful.” Lara turned back to the download. “Okay, it’s done. Find anything in those files?”
“Just a whole bunch of Balgoshan. There are plenty of invoices for payments, and he’s using the human numerical system, but the actual words are all foreign. This guy was making a ton of money – there’s a consignment here for over five hundred thousand credits. Beats me what it was for though. Or where it all went.”
Troy walked into the office with a sour expression. “Lara, we have a problem.”
“What is it now?”
“Evening, Agent Taylor,” a dry voice purred from outside the door and a short, slightly overweight man in his early forties entered. He had sandy hair with only a few flecks of gray along his sideburns and a square jaw to match his pale green eyes, which drilled through Gresham like heavy machinery the moment he laid notice to him. “Who’s your friend? LAPD?”
Lara sighed. “Hi, Daniel. You don’t think you could be polite for once, do you?”
“Daniel Vosen, Special Intelligence,” the man said and extended a hand. “I’m with the Alien Affairs desk.”
“Major John Gresham,” was the awkward response, followed by a reluctant handshake.
Vosen raised an eyebrow. “Oh is that so? I’ll assume you’re with Military Intelligence then. Let’s see some identification.”
Gresham paused. Vosen snapped his fingers and gestured with his hand for emphasis. “I won’t ask again, Major. You’re in my jurisdiction.”
“Take it easy, Vosen,” Lara muttered, but Gresham politely complied and handed his ID card over. Vosen glanced at it, raised an eyebrow and handed it back.
“You’re a JLOC! That’s high up. How’d you wind up down here?”
“It’s a long story, Mr. Vosen.”
“Agent Vosen, to you. And I’ve got all night.”
Gresham was unsure how to respond, but both Lara and Troy stepped closer. “Vosen, leave the man alone. He’s collaborating with us on an ongoing investigation.”
“Fair enough. Well, as I was going to say, I need you both out of this room immediately so we don’t… tamper with the evidence. My team’s coming down in the morning to do a thorough look-through.”
“We sent a few boxes off with the police.”
“We’ll get those in the morning. You’re done here, Lara, go home.” Vosen straightened his back and glared at Gresham. “A pleasure, Major. I’ll see you around.”
The words hung in the air like smoke.
Was that a threat? Gresham wondered as he nodded in response and led the way out of the room.
Once out of the warehouse, and past the police perimeter, Gresham finally turned towards Lara. “Who the hell was that guy?”
“Dan Vosen is Brighton’s replacement as section chief,” she answered. “He’s a real charmer, isn’t he?”
Troy coughed and indicated a police cruiser hovering nearby. “The officers said they’d fly us back to our HUVR in Moreno Valley. We’ll drive you back to Santa Monica so you can get your HUVR and go home, Major.”
“Thank you.”
The entire flight in the cruiser was completely silent. Gresham peered out the window at the sprawling darkness of the ETZ below them, peppered with the occasional twinkling light. He looked in the other direction at the endless bright expanse of Los Angeles in the distance.
I need a drink, he thought, rubbed his face in his hands and leaned back in his seat as the cruiser’s brakes whined to life and they circled down towards Moreno Valley.
#
It was barely six in the morning when Perry’s LUXR pulled onto Crest Avenue from his hotel in downtown Los Angeles and sped away towards Shoregrove and the government district.
Perry yawned and rubbed his eyes before removing a small vial containing a green gelatin from his jacket pocket. He licked his index finger and scooped up a small speck of the stuff from the vial and placed it on his tongue. Instantly, he felt a rush of energy, his eyes bulged and the sensation reached every nerve in his body. He grabbed the side of his seat and his toes curled up in his shoes. His knuckles were white, his heart was pounding and he felt a bulge in his pants.
Damn, that’s good shit, he thought and blinked as the initial rush of the drug wore off. He lifted his leg gingerly to let the blood flow back into it and he breathed out deeply before capping the vial again and placing it back in his pocket. He would have to remind his personal assistant on Mars to get more of it for him.
He pressed a button next to his seat and a holographic report appeared in front of him. He scrolled through it, grimaced, and then changed to a different report. After about five minutes of skimming article after article, his LUXR slowed to a halt.
“We’re here,” his driver said. “Should I wait in the garage or out back?”
“I’ll be a while. Go get yourself a cup of coffee or something and pick me up in two hours,” Perry responded and gave the driver a hefty tip. “Thank you for your expediency.”
Perry disembarked from the LUXR and watched it zoom down the road. He turned to look up at the shiny, glass façade of one of the numerous buildings housing the offices of various Commissioners and other high level bureaucrats. Due to the lack of space at Shoregrove, the upper echelons of the legislative and bureaucratic branches of Allied government had moved off of the Rotunda to these less assuming buildings along Crest Ave.
He approached the door of the building directly before him and placed his hand against a scanner on the wall. “Elijah Perry,” he said flatly.
The building’s AI responded, “What is your business, Mr. Perry?”
“I’m here to see Commissioner Jackson D. French,” he answered. “I believe I am registered for an appointment at this time?”
“Mr. French’s office has cleared your entrance,” the AI said dutifully and the locking mechanism’s light went from red to green. “Please enter at this time.”
Perry was glad to get inside – even this early in the morning, he was feeling the heat. When had Los Angeles gotten so infernally hot? He remembered barely ten years ago it had been pleasant out this time of year.
Jack French’s office was on the third floor of the building, and the windows unfortunately overlooked little else but the identical building next door. The suite included a reception room, two side offices for his chief aides, and his own personal office at the far end of a hallway.
Perry knew that there were advanced security systems built into the walls of the hallway going down to French’s office. If a threat was detected, he would be pummeled by stun shots and left to lie there until the police came to retrieve him. French had installed the state-of-the-art system after Perry had seen it demonstrated at the Hessian Engineering headquarters, where it was common in almost every hallway.
As the door slid open, French glanced up at Perry and scowled. “Ah, good morning Eli. Drink?”
“No thank you.”
French leaned back in his chair. “I’d like a scotch, on the rocks,” he ordered and the bar built into the wall produced a glass, filled it with ice and then a squirt of the brown liquor from a nozzle, all in rapid succession.
Getting up to grab his drink, French looked at Perry. “So what’s new on Mars, Eli? Heard things are getting shitty in ‘Neer City.”
Perry shrugged. “Nothing unusual. The weather’s nasty and you can barely walk fifteen feet without some vagrant sticking his hand out for a few credits.”
“Los Angeles isn’t much better. If you think its hot now, wait until midday. And the aliens – Christ, there are so many ETs you can smell them from half a mile away,” French muttered in disgust and sipped his scotch. “We can’t even contain them in that zoo we buil
t for them out in the desert. It’d save the government plenty of money to ship them all home and give their jobs to the destitute here.”
“I doubt many humans would do ET work.”
“Well, at the rate they’re advancing AI these days, we might not have to soon,” French remarked and wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “What’s the word on the street back on Mars after the bombing?”
“After the Haimon assassination? Well, it makes the President and his cronies look bad. Someone dropped the ball.”
“Yeah, you could say that. Christ, I was hoping I could at least run against the man in a general election before someone blows the old bastard up. He polls well, too, I had no idea he was so unpopular.”
Perry cracked his fingers uncomfortably. “Have you considered that Haimon may have been the target, Jack?”
“You can’t be serious?”
“He was very unpopular back home on Vega. His majority coalition in their government was about to collapse, there was a general election imminent. That election has been moved up by two months to next week in order to more rapidly name a successor.”
French coughed. “Well, shit. How do you know these things before I do, Eli?”
“I thought that was my job?”
“Maybe. Maybe it is.” French finished his scotch, regarded Perry for a moment and then set the empty glass aside. “Look, there’s something I’m meaning to talk to you about…”
“Yes?”
“I’m getting worried about Hess. The way the media is portraying the man, the ruckus getting stirred up in the Commission over his business tactics…”
“Jack…”
French raised a hand. “Colin Hess is one of the best campaign contributors on Mars, probably in the Alliance, but I have a primary to run in. I have enemies within the party who will eat me alive if I’m throwing my support behind Hess while the witch hunt is on.”
Perry sighed. “Jack, we’ve talked about this before. Colin is an extremely valuable ally. We can’t alienate him.”
“We can’t alienate him, or you can’t?” French growled. “Eli, I’m not running against a Martian opponent. This isn’t about protecting union jobs. The Allied Socialist base will demand that I take a tougher stance on defense contractors. I can get away with opposing the reform bill as it stands now because it unfairly hurts my constituents, but can you imagine what the left-wingers would do in the primaries if we’re still in bed with Hessian Engineering?”