Endgame

 

He had stalked her for months, and ended up on Krugman.

 

Tyell Jackson-Pierce stuck out but he was certain she hadn’t spotted him. Or if she had, she didn’t consider him to be a mortal threat. She didn’t notice him on the liner where they’d spent over a standard month traveling from the planet Emerson.

 

That was a function of the economy, still in freefall from the Blip of 2551. The liner, small as it was, was mostly empty and passengers stuck to themselves. Tyell even had his own suite. That in itself was rare in good times. Tyell didn’t mind; he liked the privacy and it enabled him to have a bit more comfort. At other times when traveling from world to world he’d been stuck with other travelers who wouldn’t shut up. A growl at the individual generally worked wonders. This was why he hated to travel.

 

Each job put him farther and farther from his homeworld. His besieged, invaded, homeworld. His home star was dim enough even from nearby stars but the liner’s telescope couldn’t even locate it during the few times it left FTL to reset the onboard clocks with real-time. The time-debt from traveling in apparent FTL was another annoyance. Real-time moved much slower.

 

His mission was simple: Eliminate the Scorpion agent. This would be his sixth. It was a favor to the Federated Nations, even if they refused to recognize the great threat that the Scorpion Republic posed to the lives of everyone, everywhere. Or sanction the vigilante work that he and a dozen others were doing.

 

She was pretty, for a terrorist. Her skin was an odd pale blue pallor, with blond, almost white, hair. She was tall, and thin. She’d stand out on Krugman, whose original colonists tended to have olive or dark skin. Three centuries of adaptation to Krugman’s higher gravity gave them a shorter, stockier appearance. Why’d they send her here? He pondered to himself as he observed her on the liner. He fit in better than she did on this planet.

 

Tyell had stalked her across three worlds. He was assigned the mission on Gaea. He found her on Emerson, in the colony of New Florida, where he discovered an entire community of pale blueish-skinned people. He later learned they were Sarossans, natives of a colony that had chosen isolation instead of becoming part of the Federated Nations during the Consolidation years. The colony’s terraforming project was apparently near failure and the colony’s government was unstable. Sarossans with means were fleeing their dying world.

 

This was a new and disturbing trick of the Scorpions: find colonies within the Federated Nations but not affiliated that were close to failure. In the past they simply outright invaded them, however Sarossa’s location deep within the Federated Nations made that prospect impossible. Still, this was information his employers needed to have. He filed it away in his implant for future use. The scattered diaspora from Sarossa could prove problematic.

 

He wasn’t going to find out what she was up to. That wasn’t his mission. Eliminate the agent before they had a chance to put whatever plans they had to work and move on to the next mission was all he was required to do. She’d never leave the spaceport grounds.

 

Still, he felt a pang for the tall, wiry young woman. She was a refugee, just as he was. He wondered if she even remembered her homeworld, the way he remembered his. Following her through Krugman Interstellar Main Spaceport, he flashed back to the day he and six thousand others made the mad dash from Banneker’s capital of Dubois to a sheltered hidden warm valley on the planet’s darkside where old transport liners laid waiting. He was only six S-years[1] old. His mothers and father had ripped him from bed that day as the Scorpions invaded. They had just climbed over the hills in a vtolcopter when Dubois vanished in a brilliant, hideous flash. Tyell grimaced, and the pang vanished. He trudged onward. She still had not spotted him, but the spaceport was crowded.