the face of a twenty-something female, her black hair cut short and spiky, her normally pale face red with embarrassment.
“Sorry Sergeant Crossman,” she stuttered. “I just knew that one of my squads was taking fire from the building…”
Crossman took a deep breath, visibly trying to control his temper, then ran a hand across his swept-back brown hair. He had a movie star’s face, with a strong jaw and high cheekbones and usually an easy smile, though not at the moment.
“Noble sacrifices are very romantic, Recruit Manning,” he bit off, “but this skirmish is only part of your mission. If this were a real op, and you got yourself killed early in the action, your team would be a troop short and missing a leader. So next time you’re faced with this situation…” He pointed behind her, where fifty meters away the ground dropped off into a gulch. “Get to cover,
He looked around at the rest of the recruits. “No matter how little time you have, there is
“I’m still Team Leader, Sergeant Crossman?” she asked, surprised.
“Till you get it right, Manning,” he nodded. “Get them moving and don’t get yourself killed this time. Unless you have to.”
“Yes, Sergeant!”
Crossman shook his head as he watched her yelling at the rest of the recruits to get them moving back down the game trail.
“She remind you of anyone, Tom?” A voice came from behind him and that easy smile returned.
“Just some reckless, ballsy LT I once knew,” he turned and saluted as Shannon Stark walked down the hill. She was dressed for the field in dark battle utilities, a sidearm holstered at her waist. Not that she’d need it in the Canadian wilderness, but it was regulation for Intelligence, thanks to Colonel McKay. “How’ve you been ma’am?”
“Busy,” she sighed. “Always busy, especially now that Colonel McKay got the itch to be a field op again. How are Rosalita and the kids?”
“Doing great ma’am… little Jimmy started preschool and Mira is walking now. So what brings you out this way? Don’t usually see the big brass until selection time gets closer.”
“I needed to run something by you. I know you’re busy, but Vinnie and Jock went off with Jason, so you got a minute?”
He checked his watch, grinning. “I have exactly three hours and twenty four minutes, ma’am. Let’s go sit down.”
Tom led her into the buildfoam dome they had been using as part of the “enemy compound,” shoo-ing out the Op-For personnel that had been firing simulators at the recruits. They sat at a table next to stacks of bricks of fake hyperexplosives and Tom poured her a cup of coffee.
“So what’s eating you, Boss Lady?” he prodded, taking a sip from his own mug.
“Tom, we have some chatter that there’s going to be trouble with the Colonial Guard. A lot of them don’t like the new emigration policies and the new rules in place limiting their authority in the colonies, and a lot of the parents of the officer corps don’t like the fact that they aren’t getting kickbacks from the Multicorps anymore for funneling them cheap labor. So the word is, there’s going to be a mutiny, that the CeeGee armories on all the colony worlds are going to seize power from the local governors.”
“I can believe it,” Crossman nodded. “Things aren’t too great for anyone right now and it’s worse in the Developing Blocs.”
“I have Ari working that angle already,” she went on, “but the other shoe is, the mutiny is supposed to coincide with an attempt on President O’Keefe’s life.”
Crossman whistled in surprise, his face thoughtful. “That’s a pretty ambitious move for the CeeGee officer corps,” he mused. “And what’s the endgame here? Do they think that Vice President Dominguez is going to reverse the emigration policies just because he’s from Central America? Or maybe they have something on him that won’t work on O’Keefe…”
“That’s something I am going to have to check out,” Shannon nodded. “And it’s going to be a bitch doing it without the President finding out. But the reason I came to you has less to do with the why and more to do with the how.”
“Right, like if they actually think they have a chance of succeeding, they gotta have an inside guy,” he said. “Unless they’re planning on crashing a cargo ship into the President’s mansion out of orbit, and even the CeeGees can’t be crazy enough for that. So who has access and opportunity that we think would want to do it?”
“And do they plan on getting away with it?” Shannon pondered, rubbing a hand on the back of her neck tiredly. “If you’re willing to sacrifice yourself, you can use any method… hell, a sharp stick would do it.”
“But if you want to get away with it,” Crossman amplified, “you have to use something undetectable, something that can’t be traced back to you. So let’s take three approaches here… what could you use if you wanted to get away with it, what could you use if you didn’t care and what couldn’t you use at all?”
“Well, this stuff’s out the window,” Shannon laughed, kicking at the stack of fake hyperexplosives. “There’s chemscanners all around the President, wherever he goes, and there’re too many different people running them to fake them all out. Same goes for conventional firearms.”
“Most poisons too, and those aren’t sure kills, not with the medical facilities he always has available around him. So, we’ve ruled out bombs, guns and poisons,” he ticked off on his fingers. “You could try for a long-range, coldgas-launched missile, but the automated defenses the Security Service sets up wherever the President goes should be able to detect those and shoot them down. Maybe,” he mused, “a Gauss gun could do it, if it was powerful enough and you could set it up far away enough to escape detection during the security sweep. No way the defenses could shoot down a tungsten penetrator going that fast. They wouldn’t even detect it till it was past.”
“Getting a clear shot from that far away would be difficult to set up though,” Shannon pointed out. “That’s one of the things the Security people look for right away when they’re scouting a location.”
“Wouldn’t necessarily
“You’re right,” she nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, we’ll mark that down as a possibility. We can always have Security widen their scans and look for power readings that could fire a gun that big. Anything else? Anything that could get him when he’s at home? In Capital City?”
“Well, we’re back to a sharp stick or an orbital strike there,” Tom shrugged. “I just don’t see a way for the killer to get away, so it would have to be either up close and personal and he doesn’t care if he dies in the attempt, or it’s something so big that it’s more a coup than an assassination.”
Shannon frowned and her eyes narrowed. “That’s an interesting thought, Tom.” She shook her head clear, then smiled warmly. “So, how’s this class looking?”
“Lots of promise in this one,” he told her, accepting the abrupt change of subject without flinching. “Gonna’ be hard to keep the normal cull rate. I’d like to graduate half of them, to be honest.”
“Take them, then,” she told him. He raised an eyebrow. “If Jason does find Antonov somewhere out there… well, we may need all the help we can get.”
Shamir watched the line of Colonial Guard officer candidates through his binoculars as the camouflage-clad, armored men and women moved through the tall grass of the wide, open plane, their weapons held listlessly, fatigue plain in their gait and pace as the afternoon sun beat down on their heads. They’d been in the field for three days, little of it spent sleeping, and they were not used to it. They were only three weeks into the four-month training course and most of them had never even picked up a weapon before their trip to the range in week one, much less humped one through the boonies.
“Sergeant Chen,” he transmitted over the ‘link microphone attached to his collar, “whenever you’re
