The shuttle corrected itself as it drifted further away from the hauler that had brought it to Terra. Similar docking rigs and the monstrous haulers they supported hung suspended in space all around the small craft, and as the shuttle righted itself in anticipation of its flight down to the surface, it came closer and closer to the planet, where a bevy of ships of all sizes were flying in and out of the atmosphere.
“This is your pilot,” a voice announced over the claustrophobic shuttle’s intercom. “The descent to Los Angeles will take about twenty to thirty minutes. Please, do not remove your safety harness for any reason.”
The powerful engines on the craft flared to life and the vessel shot forward. Zurra was pressed backwards into his seat and he grabbed onto the sides of his chair. The shuttle curved like a diving bird into the atmosphere of Terra above an island chain between two massive continents and straightened itself out over the ocean. Zurra heard a massive boom as the atmosphere became thick enough for the sounds of the engines to be heard by the naked ear.
The shuttle shook violently for several minutes, the windows filled with the glow of red plasma, before stabilizing just above a patchy bank of clouds. Zurra peered out and saw nothing but ocean beneath the shuttle in between the wispy cumuli.
Soon, the clouds dissipated and Zurra was met with a stunning sight. A coastline stretched before the shuttle in both directions, and tall, glimmering towers shone in the sunlight as far as the eye could see. Off the coast of this metropolis, a multi-tiered platform the size of a small city floated in the heart of the water, ships flying in and out of its docking bays. The shuttle circled the offshore spaceport twice, allowing Zurra more time to soak in the spectacle.
The shuttle flew down to a docking bay on the spaceport’s fourth level, landing skillfully between two much larger passenger craft. There was a brief thud as the ship touched down to the floor of the hangar and then a whine as the engines slowly cooled off.
“We have arrived in the city of Los Angeles on Planet Terra,” the pilot announced. “It is currently 3:08 PM, local time, with an outdoor temperature of about 97 degrees Fahrenheit. Please have your immigration forms ready when you enter the spaceport itself. Thank you for flying, and welcome to Los Angeles.”
Zurra unbuckled his harness and rose along with the other passengers. Due to his status as a military officer, he had been afforded a window seat near the front of the shuttle. He stepped out through the door and descended a staircase to the tarmac below.
The heat was a shock. The Krokandir rarely experienced temperatures this high even during the summer months. Zurra breathed in the heavy, hot air and blinked. The air felt dirty and polluted. He wandered towards the edge of the docking bay to get another look at the city. Along the horizon, he could make out a distinct, low lying brown cloud that seemed to hug the coastline and water.
“Hey, Crock, you can’t be back here!” a human technician called from the back of a neighboring shuttle. “Get away from the edge!”
Zurra glanced at the human and nodded. “Yes, I apologize,” he said slowly in Standard and moved away from the edge of the docking platform.
He heard the technician say to his colleague, “Can you believe that? Fucking Crocks. Don’t have any clue.”
The other krokator who had flown in with Zurra were shepherded down a long, cramped tunnel lit with fluorescent arches that stretched from wall to wall across the ceiling. They eventually arrived inside a comfortable, climate-controlled room filled with desks. Behind each desk was a grim-looking human, and a line of a variety of species from around the galaxy had formed in front of each desk.
A tall human soldier carrying a gun indicated to the krokator to line up in front of a specific desk. Zurra was allowed through the line thanks to his status, but where in the Empire he would normally have taken this deference for granted, he felt strangely uneasy about this practice here. The human clerks at each desk stared at him as he moved up through the throng. Their looks were hardly approving.
Zurra arrived at the front of the line and a dark-skinned human clerk waved him forward. “Papers, please,” the clerk said with an air of detachment. Zurra complied and handed him his identification.
The clerk glanced through the documents and looked back up at Zurra. “It says here you are a military officer,” he said in virtually flawless Krokam.
“Yes,” Zurra replied.
“What is the business of the Imperial Military on Terra?”
“I am part of an advance diplomatic detail, here to make preparations for the High Prod’s upcoming visit.”
“On a civilian shuttle?”
“Yes.”
The clerk paused and pressed a button on a pad next to him. “Wait one moment, please.”
Two large men approached and the clerk handed them his papers. Both of the men motioned for Zurra to step aside to let some of the civilians through, before proceeding to thoroughly look through the travel documents.
“Would you please come with us, Sharm Akgu Zurra?” one of the men said in Krokam.
Zurra nodded in compliance and followed them through the immigration checkpoints and into a dimly lit side hallway.
One of the men opened a door to a cramped antechamber and pointed to three chairs surrounding a round table. “Please, have a seat. We will return shortly.”
Zurra sat down as requested and the men shut the door, without returning his papers to him. About ten minutes later a new human entered, this time carrying Zurra’s luggage.
“Do not touch it,” he ordered sternly in Krokam and set it down in the corner.
Zurra was unsure what exactly he had done wrong, or why so many humans spoke his language so well, but he was concerned as to what would happen if he disobeyed the orders. He patiently waited for what felt like hours, staring into the wall-length mirror or straight up at the pale white ceiling.
Finally, after an eternity, the door opened and two humans, one male and one female, entered and sat down in the other two chairs.
“Sharm Akgu Zurra,” the female said in Krokam with a sharp tone, looking over his papers. “You know that the Imperial Military cannot operate on human worlds.”
“I know,” Zurra answered. “I am part of a diplomatic detail.”
“Who is your contact?” the male asked bluntly. “Who is your sukuda contact in Los Angeles?”
“I have no sukuda contact, for I am part of the Imperial Military. I work for High Prod Nikkwill. I am part of his advance contingent in preparation for the defense summit.”
“What defense summit? There is no defense summit. Stop lying to us!” the male snarled.
The female held up a hand. “We know why you are here, Sharm Akgu Zurra. You are an agent of the sukuda sent to spy on the Alliance in the wake of your Emperor’s assassination. We can and will hold you here indefinitely if you do not help us.”
Zurra sighed. “I am not sukuda. You can call Ambassador Jerven, he knows me and why I am here.”
The male continued fuming but said nothing. The female ran a hand through her long, dark hair before smiling. “Very well. Ian, get a hold of the Imperial Embassy.”
The male got up and left the room. The female, meanwhile, rose and approached Zurra’s luggage and opened it, rummaging through the contents of the two large bags.
Zurra remained silent, his concern rising as his predicament grew seemingly stranger by the second.
#
Behind the two-way mirror, two SIS agents smoked cigarettes and watched the large, dark-black krokator stare stoically right at them. He couldn’t see them, but it still unnerved them both how the alien’s dark, fierce eyes seemed to lock with theirs.
“This is getting ridiculous. If he is sukuda, he’s too well trained to tell us anything without some serious, serious duress. Besides, I don’t think anyone in the galaxy, especially a Crock officer, would be intimidated by Ian.”
The other agent chuckled and dragged on his cigarette. “Yeah, true. Still. If he is sukuda, we
can’t just release him into the city. Knowing the Crocks, if they’re pissed about their Emperor dying, he could cause some serious damage if he’s after revenge out there. I’m surprised we let that many civilians through immigration.”
There was a beep on the panel in front of them and the second agent pressed a button to respond. The holographic head of Dan Vosen, the new head of the SIS Alien Affairs department, loomed in front of them.
“I got Agent McPhane’s call. I talked to the Crock Ambassador, this guy is good,” Vosen said. “We don’t have any choice but to release him.”
The first agent elbowed his colleague and mouthed, Told you. The second agent rolled his eyes and stamped out his cigarette.
“Yes, Mr. Vosen. We’ll let him go.”
“Keep tabs on him though, and don’t let Sharm Zurra leave the Embassy without somebody tailing him. I’ll talk to somebody at the ET desk about arranging it, but for the meantime, Agent Flowers, you’re responsible.”
“Yes, sir.”
The head vanished as Vosen ended the call and both agents leaned back.
Their female colleague left the interrogation room and looked into the control room behind the mirror. “Well?”
“Let him go,” the agent named Flowers said and got up. “We have nothing to hold him with and their ambassador vouched for him.”
The woman nodded and returned to the interrogation room. She explained in Krokam that the krokator was free to leave, and the alien looked relieved. He rose, grabbed his luggage and walked out the door, escorted by two new SIS agents.
Chapter Sixteen: Special Intelligence
Los Angeles, Planet Terra, Sol System
“Good morning, John. You have a visitor,” Tiff cooed and Gresham blinked awake. His head was pounding.
“What? Oh, right. One second. Who’s calling?”
“A Ms. Lara Taylor is waiting to be buzzed into the building.”
“Yeah, let her in.”
Taylor… what the hell is she doing here? Gresham wondered and stretched. He was tangled with the sheets in his bed and the bottle of tequila he had done some serious damage with the night before was lying open on the floor, the bare remainder of its contents spilled all over the carpeting and some of his dirty clothes.
“Time, Tiff?”
“It is currently 1:31 PM, Major,” Tiff replied dutifully. “SLOC Colonel Gary Moss submitted thirty pages worth of briefing at 12:30.”
“Did he leave any other message?” Gresham asked. As he dragged himself out of bed, he felt vomit build in his throat from the smell. He quickly pulled a pair of clean pants on before entering the living room.
“Yes, Colonel Moss left a message: I know you’re drunk since you didn’t come to the office, but here’s your assignment for the week. See you soon and learn to pick up your goddamn vox. Would you like me to repeat or delete the message, John?”
Love you too, Gary, Gresham thought with a chuckle and cracked his knuckles. “Delete it, I don’t need to hear that again. Anything else?”
“Commissioners Gregory Reed and Jackson French have both left messages for you. Would you like to hear them?”
“Yeah,” Gresham answered and walked into the kitchen, grabbing a mug from the counter and sticking it under a nozzle. “Coffee.”
The nozzle squirted black coffee so that the cup was about three-quarters full. The sound of Reed’s voice echoed in the apartment as Tiff replayed the message.
“Hey, John, just wanted to see how you were doing. Heard about your little adventure down in the Zone… I think I found something that might help you. Call me back later when you’re available.”
“Milk,” Gresham yawned, shoving the cup under a different nozzle. Tiff complied with a shot of milk into the coffee as the second message began.
“Major Gresham, this is Jack French. I wanted to know if there was anything else you needed. I’ve got a friend from Mars in town, he’s well-connected. Just don’t ask him where he gets his information – I don’t, and I don’t really want to know. Call me if you’re interested.”
There was a buzz at the door.
“Unlock,” Gresham said and the door clicked. Lara pushed it open and entered the room, looking around at the mess.
“Well, you certainly keep this place tidy,” she observed and coughed. Her gaze fell on the shirtless, droopy-eyed Gresham. “Christ, Major, you look…”
“Thank you, I know,” he answered and grimaced before sipping his coffee. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, I’m fine… I’ve been calling you. You didn’t answer yesterday or this morning. I got worried.”
“I was recuperating. I haven’t been out in the field since the Dhruiz War. And yes, that was almost twenty years ago. Still. I barely slept after we came back from the Zone. Felt like shit all of yesterday and the day before. So I called in sick and got drunk.”
He sipped his coffee again and surveyed Lara. She was dressed professionally, wearing a sleeveless black top, a pair of tight navy pants and had her hair tied back in a bun. The gun holster on her hip was glaringly obvious.
“Is it legal for you to walk around Los Angeles like that?” he asked, motioning towards her gun with his coffee cup.
“Oh, shut up,” she said and rolled her eyes. “Mind if I smoke in here?”
“Tiff, open the windows please,” Gresham said and all the windows in his living room slid open noiselessly. “Go right ahead.”
Lara sat down on a couch and pulled her pack of cigarettes out. “Want one?”
“I’ll pass. So what brings you all the way out to the Palisades?”
“I went over Lugrash’s files,” she said, a glint of pride in her eyes. “They were a goldmine. I’ve never seen such a wealth of transactions. Other smugglers, offworld buyers, suppliers here on Terra and elsewhere – it was mind-boggling.”
“Anything we can use?”
“Well, plenty of arrests will be made. I translated his hard data into Standard and he had a ledger of his cash flows in there. No individual transactions – that was all on paper. But the cash itself was computerized. We don’t know what he was buying or selling based on the hard-drive, but we can match it to the paperwork once it’s translated and pin individuals in the Zone and outside of it.”
“Does that help with Vance at all?”
Lara lit her cigarette and pulled a disk out of her bag. She inserted it into the disk reader in Gresham’s table and the ledger was displayed on his screen.
Gresham leaned against the counter and studied the maze of names and numbers. “So we have payments… but these could all be fully legal.”
“I doubt many are, but yes. It’ll be a chore to go through every one of his files and look up every one of these transactions, especially since these are alphabetized and his hard copies were filed by date. Frustrating, right?”
“I’ll say,” Gresham said and approached the couch. “So we’re the only people besides Cray who have this, right?”
“Right. Cray put a Level One seal on all the hard evidence as well as the information off of Lugrash’s hard drive. Only Vosen and his handpicked team are allowed to look at it, at Cray’s discretion.”
Gresham clicked his tongue. “What exactly does Simon Cray gain by locking up all this information? It seems a little… counterproductive.”
“It’s not just his ego. Cray…” Lara paused and dragged on her cigarette. She seemed at unease. “Look, there may be something serious going on here. I don’t just mean the weapons, I mean in the Alliance. In the whole galaxy! You’re in the intelligence field, so you know all about the recent assassinations within major League worlds, right?”
“How couldn’t I? Gardell, the Empire, and they tried to kill Paine when the Vegan President was knocked off.”
“Exactly. It’s too convenient to all be happening at the same time. Somebody is killing off heads of state around the galaxy, and it has Cray spooked. He’s been spooked for weeks. I just don’t know what he’s sitting on o
r what he knows.”
Gresham nodded. “I see.”
Lara breathed carefully. “Look, I came over because I can’t do this by myself. Troy’s been keeping a low profile since we went to the warehouse… I think Vosen scared him out of collaborating with me. Either way, I know we can find out what’s happening, but I’ve hit a wall. I’m not good at asking for help, Major, but here I am.”
After a lengthy pause, Gresham grunted, “We?”
“Yes, we. You wanted to figure out what happened to Vance? Here’s your opportunity. I don’t have access to the resources you do, not with Cray sealing off every lead we get. Are you in or out? I need your help to get to the bottom of this.”
Gresham considered this and yawned before saying, “Well before we do anything else, I’m gonna go take a quick shower. Make yourself at home.”
He stumbled off down the hallway towards his bathroom. Lara breathed and buried her face in her hands. Christ, he’s difficult, she thought and walked over to the windowsill. She stamped out her cigarette and threw it outside.
The shower turned on down the hall. Lara removed her disk from the reader and put it back in her purse. Her gaze fell on three pictures mounted at about eye level on the far wall and she walked over to take a closer look.
One of the pictures was of Gresham and President Paine shaking hands in front of an indistinguishable building. Both were several years younger – Paine especially looked fresh and youthful. They both were grinning from ear to ear and Lara could see a group of military and government officials in the background.
She glanced at the next picture. This one was more current. Gresham and an older man who looked stunningly similar to him were smiling and sitting in casual shirts on lawn chairs. On the far left of the picture, with her hands on the shoulders of two young girls, was an elderly lady standing beside a young man with her same bright eyes. Gresham’s family, perhaps?
Lara turned to the final picture. Five soldiers in fatigues stood against a fence at night, holding beers and smoking cigars. Despite their youth, she recognized two of them instantly: Gresham and Greg Reed.