Honor Bound

She didn’t look at Shannon, just stepped over to the bed, her eyes locked on Finley. “Thanks for calling me, Shannon,” she said quietly. “You can go out now.”

Shannon picked up her tablet and stepped through the door without a word, closing it behind her with the press of her palm on a plate on the outside wall.

Finley snorted with amusement. “Are you supposed to intimidate me? Shame me into wanting to help you?”

“Six years ago,” Valerie said as if he hadn’t spoken, speaking slowly and calmly, “there was a man on Aphrodite named Huerta. He was a man I thought was a friend and ally, but he used me as a pawn, and wound up trying to rape me in a little farmhouse in the high desert.” Val reached into her purse and pulled out a large, broad- bladed knife. “Let me show you what I did to him, Mr. Finley.”

Outside in the corridor of the old, abandoned emergency shelter, Shannon heard the screams. She smiled grimly and waited till they stopped.

* * *

Now that the undercover part of his mission was over, Ariel Shamir was missing his old face. There hadn’t been time or opportunity to get it changed back before the flight to Houston, so he was stuck with it until the operation was over. At least, he reflected as he rubbed his chin self-consciously, he had been able to shave the damn, itchy beard.

“Stop fidgeting, kedves,” Roza whispered to him as she pretended to sip her drink.

“If this takes much longer,” he responded softly, “I’ll fucking get up and dance.”

They’d been sitting at the corner table in the out of the way bar on the outskirts of the Greater Houston Development Complex for nearly two hours, watching Colonel Lee waiting for the meet with his contact and it was pushing midnight. Lee looked even more uncomfortable and impatient than Ari felt: the Colonel was sitting alone, dressed incongruously in bland civilian clothes, at a booth near the door of the place. He was studiously ignoring the two of them, his eyes only lifting from his barely-touched drink to glance furtively at the door every few minutes.

“You know,” Ari commented, “for the mastermind of a conspiracy, the good Colonel is a bit high strung.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if this guy is going to show at all,” Roza sighed. “Maybe they had an insider with Lee’s group and they know everything’s gone to hell.”

Ari shook his head. “We’ll give it another few minutes, then I’ll signal Lee to head back to the hotel.”

He let his attention drift to the news ‘net that was playing on the bar’s glitchy, flickering holotank. He couldn’t hear the sound, but the video they were showing was of Senator Valerie O’Keefe-Mulrooney-archival footage of a speech she’d given-and then it cut to President O’Keefe, looking worried and old and then a stock shot of the Old City. He frowned. What the hell was all that about?

He was about to check the news on his ‘link when the bar’s doors hissed open and Lee looked around, as he had every time they’d opened the last two hours… but this time, the expression on his face was relief mixed with anxiety.

“I think we have a winner,” Roza whispered.

The woman was somewhere in her forties, Ari judged-you couldn’t tell by appearance of course, but with practice and observation you could make a good guess by a how a person carried themselves. She was dressed in civilian clothes, but the way she wore them was so precise and tucked in that Ari knew with a moral certainty that she was recent ex-military, if not current military. Her dark hair was cut short in severe bangs and her face looked as if it were frozen in a perpetual stern frown. And by God, he knew her!

The woman took a seat at the bar beside Lee, but didn’t speak immediately. She pulled a glass from the dispenser and placed it under the spigot, then tapped the screen to dispense herself a beer. The bar read her ID from her ‘link and charged her account automatically

“I don’t like you being here, Lee,” she finally spoke, not looking at the Colonel, looking for all the world as if she were speaking to someone on her ‘link. “This is unnecessarily conspicuous.”

“It can’t be helped,” Lee said tightly, taking a cue from her and not making eye contact. “There are things I could not tell you via any method that can be intercepted, and I need guidance that can’t be given from a dead drop.”

“Well out with it, for God’s sake,” she grumbled.

“The Guard Investigative Service knows about the… operation,” he said, licking his lips nervously. “They had a plant in my staff.”

“That is unfortunate,” she said harshly, her hand tightening on her glass.

Lee winced. “She was about to call in a raid and have us all arrested, but she trusted the wrong man and never got to make that call. That gives us time, but not much. I need to know if things are imminent. If they are not, we need to grab as many recruits as we can and go find a secure location to hide until we can move forward with our part of this. If there is not much longer to wait, we can hold out where we are, perhaps with valuable hostages such as General Kage. We might even make a move into the city.”

Ari nodded slowly. Lee was performing well. He’d had his doubts, particularly on the flight from South America.

“I’m not authorized to tell you anything about the timetable,” the woman said, shaking her head. “And I don’t know, even if I were.”

“Then find out,” Lee ground out through clenched teeth. “Get authorized. Or I swear, I will find a hole and pull it in after me and that is the last you will hear of me. I will not be a distraction for you… I will not sacrifice good men and women to make things easier for your bosses. If you treat me as a valuable ally, you will have a valuable ally. If you treat me as a disposable flunky, you will have nothing.”

“Calm down, Lee,” she said soothingly. She sighed with resignation. “Give me two hours, then check the messages on our dead drop. It will be one word: ‘go’, or ‘stay.’ If it’s ‘go,’ then we’re looking at more than two weeks. That’s all I can do.” She didn’t wait for an answer, just downed her beer with one gulp and stood up. “Wait ten minutes before you leave,” she instructed him, heading for the door.

“Did you grab her ‘link signal?” Ari asked Roza as the woman walked out into the dark street.

Roza checked the tablet she’d been holding under the table. “Yes. It’s spoofed and anonymous, obviously, but it took the Trojan and it’s broadcasting the ping. I can’t say how long it’ll be before she enters a secure facility and they block it down, but we have her for now.”

“Doesn’t matter if we lose the ping,” he said, grinning. “I know who she is.”

Roza glanced up at him, startled. “You do?”

“She’s Helenne D’Annique,” he informed her. “She was the First Officer on the Patton, Admiral Patel’s ship during the war. I was on the ship as a Marine; she always struck me as a cast-iron bitch. I don’t know where she’s been the last five years… but I know how to find out.”

“Well, isn’t this interesting?” Ari mused, rubbing his chin unconsciously as he stared at his tablet screen. It had been over an hour since the meeting at the bar and the three of them had made their separate ways back to the hotel, a working-class place in a cheaper area of town that wasn’t that scrupulous about accepting anonymized accounts. Ari was seated in a chair while Lee and Roza huddled around the desk terminal, watching the dead drop account for a message.

“You got something?” Roza asked, moving to the chair to look over this shoulder.

“D’Annique resigned her commission not too long after the war,” he replied, summarizing the Fleet Intelligence dossier on the woman that he had been reading. “She lived off her savings and half-pension for a year until she was hired by a small security firm here in Houston… which pays her somewhere on the order of ten times her military salary, and is, coincidentally enough, a very, very indirect subsidiary of Republic Transportation multicorps.”

“Szar,” Roza cursed in Hungarian. “This is so above my pay grade.”

“Yeah,” Ari agreed, sighing. “This is going to be complicated. I think I’m going to have to call Major Stark and get some backup.” He twisted around to look at her. “Unless you have some GIS assets you trust?”

“We are a small department,” she lamented, shaking her head. “And this is not what we do… well, not what