Gods Dogs, Book 3

I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.

W.E.B. Du Bois

A few weeks later, the team was back in Master Lu’s office. The in-house training routine gave Jian the chance to adjust to her new status. In truth, it wasn’t that much of an adjustment. Or rather, she had been making the adjustment incrementally for five and a half years. She sat with the team in the alcove of Lu’s office.

“The pirate operation isn’t over,” Lu told them. “The corporate executive committee – the ring leaders – escaped to one of the Reebok worlds. The marshals don’t have jurisdiction, and Reebok doesn’t allow extradition. You will go get them.”

“Do we have jurisdiction?” Moss asked.

“Reebok is a signatory to the basic League accords, but not the whole package. So, yes, Coyotes are agreed upon for extra-judicial missions.”

“Okay,” Quinn said. “What’s our cover?”

Lu replied, “You won’t need a strong cover. Reebok is organized as Libertarian as anywhere in the League. They still use dueling to solve problems.”

Moss queried, “What are they doing supporting piracy?”

“It’s not support. The way they see it, an individual is responsible for his own defense. The government is not.”

Moss countered, “I can see that at a personal level. Each of us is responsible for his own safety, but a business whose mission statement is piracy and slavery is a different story.”

“Not according to Reebok political philosophy.”

“So it’s run by warlords?”

“Pretty much,” Lu said. “They do have a policy of leaving their own citizens alone, a laissez-faire economy, and remarkably few turf wars. They claim to follow Plato’s idea of a philosopher-king in their approach to government.”

Pax snorted. “Without, I take it, Plato’s insistence that justice is the highest virtue.”

Lu smiled. “Justice, I presume, is he who prevails in their duels.”

“Their education system ought to be fascinating,” River remarked.

“No doubt,” Lu said and stood. He retrieved a data cube from his desk and handed it to Quinn. “Here are your orders. You’re working for the marshals. Their representative will meet you tomorrow at the space station.”

The team left to prepare. First they reviewed the information on the data cube, which confirmed Lu’s briefing, but also gave details on the number and locations of the executive committee.

Next, they decided on the cover of two couples and their business manager seeking to open a small arms business. One of the departments within the Coyote support organization helped with that charade. Since they didn’t need a sturdy, long-term cover story, the arms dealer legend was fairly easy to construct.

Then they loaded what they needed onto Satya, provided the cutter with new transponder and identity codes, and hopped up to the space station orbiting Penglai.

In the morning, they met with the marshal assigned to them.

As they entered the conference room, River exclaimed, “Billy McIntire!”

The marshal, a stout man with ruddy cheeks and a pleasant but hard-chiseled face, dressed in League blue and gray, answered solemnly, “It’s senior marshal William McIntire.”

“Right,” River snorted and pulled him into a hug. “How’s Linda?”

“Neck deep in Amazonia’s version of the Coyote program.”

“Do they have a name yet?” Moss asked. “I thought Leprechauns would be a good name.”

McIntire chuckled. “The current front runner is something like Badb Catha, the Celtic raven of battle.”

“Well, that’s in keeping with the trickster theme,” Moss allowed, “but so would Leprechauns.”

Quinn sat at the table and inserted the data cube in the holo-projector. The worlds of the Reebok flickered into view.

“What’s your plan for this op?” he asked McIntire.

The marshal came with a frigate and a team of twelve SpecOp trained marshals. Their cover was to petition Reebok’s government for the extradition of the executive committee. As such, there was also a legal team to handle – actually, to prolong – the legal challenge.

The marshals were on hand to back up the extraction of the eight men and women Quinn’s team were going after.

The frigate left first, and Satya left later and took a more circuitous route. Five days later, they entered Reebok space and the star system of Highguard. It was an unremarkable system with a main sequence G2 star and a planetary accompaniment of inner, rocky planets and outer gas ones. There was an asteroid belt nearer the star, and another one separating the orbits of two gas giants. Asteroid mining was a major commercial activity here, as well as gas harvesting.

The planet Highguard, or as the locals called it HG3, was the third planet out from the star in the middle of the Goldilocks zone. Two elevators at the equator, on opposite sides of the planet, were immediately obvious, and most of the planet’s infrastructure was built around the elevators’ bases. The rest of the planet was lightly developed, mostly agriculture, farming, and ranching.

Half the planet was ocean, and the coastal areas were also developed to some degree, but less than on other worlds. The population made a concerted effort to work with the world’s ecology, and the government supported that effort. The lessons from Earth’s past seemed to have shaped developmental policy on most of the League worlds. On the planet, industrial waste had to be recyclable, for example, or it wasn’t allowed.

League Intelligence provided Quinn with contact information to an arms broker in one of the elevator cities. They made contact and parked Satya at the elevator and disembarked.

The terminus for the ground-anchored elevator was originally an asteroid to hold the cable taut at a geo-synchronous height. Over the years, a series of hotels, shops, corporate offices and so on, expanded beyond the terminus in its own space station.

The ride down the cable took about four days, and it was during that time, the team met with one of the local League agents and perfected their cover story, learned the local customs, acquired local dress appropriate for spacer arms dealers, and, with the help of their implants, learned the local dialect.

The elevator system resembled a vertical railway, in that additional cables, switching stations, and rest stops, allowed travel either up or down simultaneously, which added carrying capacity. The coaches or freight haulers were, as a result, similar to train cars, the compartments vertically stacked within.

Not the quickest way to get from orbit to the ground, but it was economically preferable. For the team, it was also less attention getting. Landing Satya at the spaceport, which was not large because of the numerous private spaceports local law allowed, would have sparked unwanted interest. At least, that’s what League Intelligence told them.

The city was a sprawl of somewhat concentric rings radiating out from the elevator base. Close in was the industrial infrastructure to feed and relieve the economic circulatory system the elevator represented.

A third of the way out from the terminal was the financial and corporate buildings, each in its own cul-de-sac off the circular highways. The hotel and commercial shops lined the main roads.

Their guide transported them to a modest hotel near the businesses they would visit to maintain their cover, but also near the corporate offices of their target.

With the laborious and time-consuming process of getting into place and securing their cover story, they retired to the adjoining rooms at the hotel and slept.

The next day, taking advantage of the mildly sexist values of the culture they were visiting, the men met with the arms dealers, and the women went shopping. The shopping trip allowed River and Jian the opportunity to fully scout the corporate office where the executive committee was located, identify the occupants, and access the building security. They floated in small recon drones that would map the building’s interior overnight, and, if possible, tap into the building’s A.I. network.

They stopped for lunch at an open-air café near the building they were monitoring. Over their combat skin-suits they wore the distinctive one-piece coverall spacers favored. It identified them as off-worlders, but also let them blend into the local population.

Spacers held a unique position in League space. They, and the ships they crewed, were the lifelines connecting distant worlds, and those connections kept the economy healthy. More than glorified truck drivers, spacers were seen as pioneers or frontiersmen that faced dangers no dirt-bound person could comprehend. There was a mystique, then, that surrounded them that did have an upside and a downside. In the commercial district, it was mostly an advantage.

“Have you got everything with Pax sorted out?” River asked as she sampled the Reuben sandwich she ordered.

“Yes,” Jian smiled. She was sampling a BLT. “It wasn’t that much of a chore to reclaim what I was projecting. Although, it was a surprise I was being harder on myself than I should have been. I have trouble owning how good I am at some things.”

“Weird, huh? We’re okay owning our faults and short-comings, but not so good at owning our strengths and competencies.”

“I keep thinking I can always do better.”

“And discount how well you already did.”

Jian chuckled. “Yeah. Now I’m making it a point, in my self-evaluations, to note what I did well before I push a new goal forward.”

“How did your self-evaluation go after that big battle on the space station?”

River was referring to the training program supernumeraries engaged in during their final year. It involved working on a Coyote team and providing Coyote central with regular self-evaluations they would need to defend.

Jian answered, “I totally skipped over Quinn’s battle plan.”

“Even though Gunny Murphy mentioned it?”

“I know!” Jian exclaimed. “I couldn’t believe it when Master Lu pointed it out.”

“What did you get from it?”

“Well, Quinn seemed so nonchalant about how the marines would breach at certain points, and then the bad guys would be neutralized in short order. When I actually examined the plan and all the other options for breaching the station, I was overwhelmed.”

“It was a tricky op.”

“Tricky isn’t strong enough. There were numerous ways that could have gone really bad.”

“Were there other ways it could have gone good?”

“Not that I could find.”

“Yeah. Me neither. Even so, we had to go berserker to make Quinn’s plan work.”

Jian nodded and tried the soup that came with the sandwich. “What about this op?”

“In a way, it’s similar. Multiple floors, entry points, stairs, elevators, and multiple points to secure. Then the timing is dependent on the bad guys. They need to be in the building at the same time before we breach.”

“I’m glad I don’t have to come up with the plan.”

River chuckled. “Didn’t Quinn tell you?”

Jian looked back in shock. “No. He wouldn’t.”

“He most certainly would.”