Dropzone

TWENTY-TWO: Deadly Omniscience

3 km S of Port Arthur
Epsilon Eridani e / Avalon
0726 hrs Local Time
April 7, 2279

"Two of them," Jo said. The magnified vision of her battle helmet's visor brought the image of the security guards circling Colonial Governor Quentin Fortunato's private residence seemingly close enough to reach out and touch, even from nearly two kilometers away. The house and low walls cast long dark shadows across the rocky ground in the low light of the early morning sun. Pools of water from the previous evening's storm shimmered silver and pink in the rising orb's light as a mild sea breeze rippled their surfaces.

The team of Katherine, Jo, Senior Chief Feathers, Lieutenant Jayaraman, Corporal Powers and Lance Corporal Pennington had just trotted the twelve kilometers from the dropship's landing site, a smooth and easy run in their muscle-and-motion enhancing battle armor despite Avalon's high gravity. The long hard training sessions Lieutenant Zielinski oversaw onboard Manning—both physical in the Wheel and virtual—were paying dividends.

Jo barely broke a sweat. It felt good to stretch out again. Simulations and exercises weren't real gigs, weren't as satisfying as rhythmically skipping across rough, jagged ground, darting around a jumble of rubble or leaping a small crevasse, man and machine in perfect harmony as they closed on a target. She was grunt, a ground-pounder, and she was on the ground again. In my element. The filter masks they wore under their pressurized helmets as a safety measure against breaches—at Katherine's insistence—were irritating, and in Jo's opinion the only sand in the Vaseline on this morning's mission.

SCPO Feathers grunted. "Says a lot that the colony's governor needs a twenty-four-seven security team in battle armor. No way they know we're here yet, so this is SOP. Sad."

"I'm assuming it's in response to the recent escalations by the rebels," Katherine said.

"Wearing some weird shit, too," Jo said. The guards wore an unfamiliar battle armor with an unusual helmet shape: a streamlined disk at the very top that protruded a few centimeters around the edges, like a large coin fused on and smoothed over. "No way they made that here."

"French. Here ya go," Feathers said, as a file of specs blinked in Jo's inbox. "The absolute latest high tech. Or, at least it was when we left. Very, very sophisticated. Almost as good as ours. Big sensor cluster, that's the thing on top. And if they had their DC on we'd have never spotted them. And they'd have pegged us if—"

"If grasshoppers had SAMs, birds wouldn't pick on 'em," Jo drawled.

"Fuck 'em," Feather's said, "if they want to waste good tech. Smile for the camera, kids."

The Manning team did have their digital camouflage on, cloaking their approach. But as good as their own DC was, Katherine had them halted them a few kilometers from the compound, at the extreme range of any known gear that could detect them with DC engaged.

"High tech French gear?" Jo scanned the rest of the compound, which was surrounded in a chest-high wall that looked purely aesthetic at a glance; but her scan quickly confirmed subtle emissions at non-visual frequencies: security fields and perimeter sensors. "What's it doing here?"

"Egg money," Katherine said. "Or, maybe even direct support from the traders themselves. Keep the Governor secure. Fortunato is making them fistfuls of creds, we saw that in the public data. Instability threatens the supply line—and profits."

Feathers nodded. "Synchs with the intel we had coming out here."

"The traders—like the one with the one with the ship in orbit," Katherine said, glancing skyward, "were the ones who shook the hornet's nest here with their money and weapons. When things blew up it probably scared them shitless for a while. Once things settled down they're going to do whatever they can to keep it that way. Even if it means propping up . . ." she gestured in the direction of the house, " . . . him."