In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Read online

  Mankind were the opposite of the Nisk. We spread through Mapped Space like an expanding cloud while they scattered their seed across the galaxy in a handful of super dense pebbles. They might have been the insects, but we acted more like a swarm. Our population was scattered so thinly across approximately two thousand four hundred light years of space that we could have lost a hundred colonies without any impact on our civilization – except for Earth itself. If anything happened to mankind’s ancient birth world, all the rest would wither and many would die. It would be that way for thousands of years to come. The Human Exodus might well be in full swing, but Earth would remain preeminent and irreplaceable for a long time to come.

  It was the speed with which humanity – the youngest, least technologically advanced interstellar civilization in the galaxy – was spreading that irritated some. We were driven by a restless, energetic need to expand, to seek opportunity, protected by incomprehensibly ancient galactic law. It was why we were everywhere we could reach, constrained only by the extent of the astrographic charts the Tau Cetins had gifted us, charts that revealed billions of navigational hazards whose gravitational influences could destroy superluminal ships in a nanosecond. Beyond those charts, navigation was so hazardous that the risks of interstellar travel far outweighed the benefits. In half a century, that would change. As full members of the Forum, we’d have access to so much more, allowing the human swarm to flood out toward the limits of a new, redefined Mapped Space – not the entire galaxy, but a larger fraction of it.

  It was why I did what I did, why I was here now, hurrying through Nisport’s grubby side streets. They were almost deserted, except for a few alien travelers wrapped against the misty rain and the occasional mud splattered surface vehicle that splashed sidewalks without regard for pedestrians. A discordant jumble of grimy, alien buildings lined the streets: towers, domes, squat windowless boxes and a variety of metallic structures reflecting alien designs from across the Orion Arm and beyond, all affixed with sensors and communications gear. The inhabitants of Krailo-Nis’s alien enclave might not have been able to make themselves comfortable, but they all spied on each other and the Nisk with equal enthusiasm.

  When I was almost halfway there, my listener flashed a yellow marker into my mind’s eye, warning of a persistent sound behind me. My DNA sniffer hadn’t detected any biomarkers, but the highly sensitive bionetics pervading my auditory senses had picked up footsteps on the road’s metal grating. They mimicked my movements, speeding up and slowing down as I did. It was unlikely anyone could have been waiting for me in Nisport, considering even I hadn’t known I was coming here ten days ago, yet I didn’t believe in coincidences.

  I stopped at the next corner, looking around as if lost. The listener’s contact marker stopped too, then my shadow vanished behind a building and waited. I didn’t look back, not wanting to alert my tail he’d been spotted, but continued on toward the rendezvous point.

  Lena’s agent was scheduled to visit the Beneficial Society’s office on the hour, to pick-up any personal messages they were holding for him and review available work hire contracts on offer at the Exchange. It gave us a reason to cross paths without drawing suspicion, to unexpectedly meet as old friends. Now I had to decide whether to abort or risk exposing her agent. A tail meant someone had penetrated the mission, but who? It could only be someone from Lena’s side, but she was mega-psi. No one could lie to her and live.

  Or could they?

  I turned down a side street, hoping to throw off my tail, but the listener’s yellow marker appeared again showing he was still with me, even though he couldn’t see me directly. He had to be tracking me with tech, something no street corner thug would do. With the rendezvous only minutes away and a teched-up tracker on my tail, I knew I’d risk exposing Lena’s agent if I made contact. To protect his identity, I’d have to abandon him – not something I wanted to do if I could possibly avoid it.

  At the next corner, the human prefabs came into view, a collection of white towers five stories high banded by dark strip windows. They were cleaner and newer than any of the alien buildings, some of which had stood in Nisport gathering grime for millennia. No attempt had been made to hide the eavesdropping sensors atop the towers because such efforts were pointless. Even so, while our tech was bottom rung, we listened in on everyone else with as much vigor as the best of them. The embassy housed an EIS intercept team, all techs, not threaded field agents like me, which was why Lena couldn’t use them for data retrieval. No bionetics meant no handshake transfers, and besides, embassy attachés were far more noticeable than shabby Society traders.

  I was about to turn away when my listener surprised me. It had been crunching numbers on the sonic data, analyzing the ring of metallic boots on the road’s grating, measuring the time delay between footfalls to determine stride length and height and calculating the intensity of the sound to estimate body mass. It now flashed a message into my mind’s eye.

  WARNING: SONIC CONTACT BIOSIGNATURE UNCERTAIN. HUMAN UPPER LIMITS MARGINAL.

  Clarify, I thought, stopping in my tracks.

  HUMAN PROBABILITY 16%, NONHUMAN 84%.

  If there’d been any chance I was going up against a nonhuman, Lena would have warned me, unless she hadn’t known! I spun around, looking back down the street, hoping to verify what my listener was telling me. Two blocks away, a large man wearing a dark gray metallic body suit and a full face helmet darted behind a building with impressive speed. Whatever he was, he was fast for a big man, almost certainly genetically engineered if human. And his suit looked too heavy to be a pressure suit, too light to be human-tech body armor. Whatever it was, it was heavier than the synthweave I was wearing.

  A hundred meters away, across a rectangular square, the stylized star chart insignia of the Beneficial Society glowed above a ground floor security door. I could have made it before my tail caught me, but that would have led him straight to Lena’s agent. I wondered if I tried to eliminate my shadow, how long it would be before the place was crawling with security drones. They might be simpletons, but properly armed with bug-tech, Nisk drones would make formidable warriors. Definitely not critters I wanted to mess with.

  That’s when I decided the mission was a washout. Even the backup opportunity in twenty four hours was now impossible. I was simply too hot to risk a second attempt. There was nothing for it but to go back to the Lining, get out of Nisport fast and give Lena the bad news. Her agent was on his own, but at least he’d be alive.

  I started east, intending to lead the large humanoid away from the rendezvous point. Before I’d gone ten paces, I heard footsteps running toward me from the direction of the human prefabs. A single heavy slug whistled by, striking a building behind me. For a moment I thought someone was shooting at me, then I saw a man dressed as a common spacer running from the Society’s Exchange. Two men and a woman appeared further down the street from where they’d been hiding, waiting for the spacer to appear. All three carried JAG-40’s, a military grade light assault weapon that fired heavy caliber slugs. They were special forces weapons, hard to control for the novice, deadly in the hands of experts.

  In spite of the respirators the humans wore, my sniffer found enough flesh on their faces to get DNA reads on all of them. A red targeting reticule appeared around the face of the man at the center of the three pursuers, the only one listed on my threading’s catalogue of cosmic criminals. He was Domar Trask, a stolid looking brute my height, with shoulders as wide as a heavy lifter and a military style buzz-cut. He was wanted by the Union Regular Army for capital crimes, but I didn’t have time to study his record as he came charging up the street.

  Trask lifted his JAG-40 to eye height and fired an expertly aimed shot that took the fleeing man in the shoulder, knocking him forward. The wounded man tucked and rolled fluidly back to his feet, continuing on with one arm hanging uselessly by his side. That recovery told me everything I needed to know. He was my EIS contact, engineered to survive, confirmed by my snif
fer which projected a green targeting reticule around the agent’s face. A moment later, white indicators appeared around the faces of Trask’s two flankers, indicating they were clean skins on nobody’s wanted list.

  The fleeing agent’s eyes locked onto mine with instant recognition. Neither of us had ever seen the other, but our sniffers knew our DNA codes in a heartbeat. My name flashed into his mind as his flashed into mine.

  TIAGO SORVINO, OUTER-ZERO-SIXTY.

  The Oh-Zero-Sixty Group was Lena’s team, my team, responsible for a vast region from zero north to sixty degrees on the celestial sphere, beyond five hundred light years from Earth. It was an immense region where two deep cover agents rarely met, and never like this.

  My contact feigned a stumble, telling his pursuers he was weakening even though his face was flushed and alert. It was a look I knew well. His bionetic implants were overriding his bodily functions, pumping adrenalin through his system, giving him a surge of strength and speed that allowed him to drive through the pain. The tell tale whine of a JAG-40 charging filled the street, then the wounded agent rolled expertly to the side as the woman fired. Her slug whistled past as my contact came to his feet and sprinted again, lining up to pass close by me. Dodging and running like that, with a slug in his shoulder, told me he was ultra-reflexed – the same genetic engineering specialty I had.

  I knew he was unarmed, otherwise he’d be shooting back. My hand dropped to my P-50 as I calculated distances and angles. His three pursuers were spread across the street in a skirmish line, firing like experts, advancing together, demonstrating a mastery of close quarters combat that told me they weren’t common criminals. With surprise on my side, I could kill one, but the other two would switch to me fast. I’d have to shoot and roll and shoot again and hope they weren’t as sharp as they looked.

  The fleeing agent saw my hand go to my gun and guessed my intentions. He gave me an imperceptible shake of the head, ordering me not to shoot, demanding I not reveal myself. It went against my instincts, but he was the agent on the ground. He knew the score. I knew nothing. I followed his command and moved my hand away from my gun, slipping into the guise of a confused bystander.

  He nodded slightly, approving my move.

  Two more tracer shots flashed past the agent’s head. Each time he dodged, warned of the danger by his listener. He pretended to stagger as he neared me while I feigned surprise, standing awkwardly in his path. The agent tripped – on purpose – and stumbled into me, knocking me back as he raised his hand, reaching for my ear and the bionetic listener within it. I moved my head as if flinching, turning the side of my face toward him, then his hand slammed against my ear. He hung on for a vital second as the bionetic filaments in his palm linked with those beneath my skin. In that moment, he passed an encrypted data block into my system, then immediately deleted it from his own.

  “Don’t help me!” he whispered. “They’ll kill you! Aleph-null!”

  Aleph-null?

  He pushed my head away roughly, knocking me aside as he continued running. I feigned a clumsy stumble and fell backwards onto the road as the agent drew his attackers away. In that moment, we both knew, my life and what I carried was more valuable than his.

  Another slug caught him in the thigh, spinning him around. His ultra-reflexes took over again, allowing him to regain his balance and continue in a limping gait, barely slowed. His bionetic pain suppressers overrode muscles close to collapse, giving him time to lead the hit squad away.

  I sat up slowly, holding my shoulder as if I’d been injured in the fall, watching him stagger away, resisting the temptation to turn and face the three killers running up behind me.

  Domar Trask threw me a careless glance as he passed, unaware he was now chasing the wrong target. The female, tall and muscular, with close cropped blonde hair fired at the crippled agent without looking my way, then she was past me too keeping formation with Trask. A moment later, the stocky square-jawed grunt on the right, shorter than the other two, veered toward me and slammed the butt of his gun into the back of my head. I crashed face first onto the road’s metal grid as threading alerts flashed into my unconscious mind, warning of critical bone damage.

  Left for dead, I lay in the mud and rain, blood draining from a crushed skull, while two blocks away an unarmed EIS agent was gunned down for a secret he no longer carried, an encrypted message now locked deep inside my threaded memory.

  A muted cacophony of buzzing drowned out the ringing in my ears as consciousness slowly returned. I had a vague sense of floating, immobilized. When I opened my eyes, I found myself face down in the center of a cone of stark white light so bright I was forced to squint. I was suspended two meters from a stone floor in a chamber of rough hewn rock walls with openings to passageways filled with the chatter of billions of Nisk. Armed drones stood in the shadows watching while another smaller bug close to me worked on my shattered skull. My head was numb all the way to the base of my jaw and threading alerts flashed warnings of alien-tech intrusions I couldn’t move a finger to stop.

  The Nisk close to me touched my forehead with cold metal, a surprisingly delicate, precise touch that caused the last of the throbbing pain to fade away. It emitted a soft hissing sound, then moved toward one of the exits. I was no expert, but the smaller Nisk’s exoskeleton was a lighter chestnut color indicating it belonged to one of the attendant castes. It carried metallic devices I didn’t recognize in its manipulator arms and wore a telescopic instrument over one of its empty black eyes.

  After the small Nisk had moved out of sight, an artificial voice sounded from the shadows. “Sirius Kade Human, your damage bone parietal is repaired.”

  I wanted to turn my head toward the voice, but the field holding me allowed only my eyes to move as another chestnut colored beetle ambled into view. It wore a vocalizer strapped to its mandible and slender strip-like devices on its antenna-manipulator arms. It moved in front of me, then the field rotated my body from the horizontal to the vertical, leaving my feet a meter off the floor and my face level with the attendant’s bulging compound eyes. I suppressed my instinctive revulsion at the sight of it, reminding myself attendants were highly intelligent and – more importantly – in charge.

  “I Katinuuk am, zone open controller. Report occurrence at five-intersect-twenty-one.”

  “Someone hit me,” I replied, determined not to let the bugs catch and dissect the grunt who’d bashed in my skull. That was my job. “I didn’t see who it was.”

  “Angular analysis indicates Sirius Kade Human struck from above-behind. Explain,” it said, confirming the Nisk had not only fixed my cracked skull, but also conducted a forensic analysis of it.

  “I was knocked down.”

  “By what?”

  “Another man. It was an accident. He’d been shot and ran into me.”

  “Is Tiago Sorvino Human known to you?”

  “Is that someone you arrested?” I said, feigning ignorance.

  “Tiago Sorvino Human is dead. Killer unknown.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said softly, meaning it. “I’d never seen him before today.” According to my EIS deception training, the best way to conceal the truth was with the truth. I hoped it would be enough to hide the anger I felt that a good man was dead. The moment he’d ordered me not to shoot, we both knew he was going to die. He’d only made such a choice because he’d believed the information I now carried was worth more than his life.

  Aleph-null!

  “Describe Tiago Sorvino Human attackers.”

  “There were three of them. I didn’t get a good look.” I assumed I was only confirming what the Nisk already knew.

  “Sirius Kade Human equipped with weapon primitive kinetic. Weapon not fired. Explain.”

  I glanced down at my holster. My MAK P-50 was missing. “That’s right. I was told weapons couldn’t be fired here. It happened so fast, I never got a chance to use it.”

  “Sirius Kade Human compliance with Nisk zone open directives note
d,” the Nisk investigator said, then it emitted a short popping sound.

  A drone moved forward holding a metal tray which it slid into the suspension field surrounding me. It left it floating in front of me and backed away.

  “Identify objects,” Katinuuk ordered.

  On the tray was a row of ten millimeter, polysteel jacketed, armor piercing slugs, one of the loads JAG-40 light assault guns were designed for. There were at least twenty of them, all twisted and bent out of shape. Those slugs could punch through two centimeters of durillium armor, not what I’d have selected for assassinating an unarmed spacer in street clothes, yet they’d hit something hard to be damaged like that.

  “They’re big ass slugs,” I replied unhelpfully. “Too big for my gun.”

  “Projectiles kinetic are military human origin.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m not in the military. Never was.”

  “Projectiles kinetic killed two drones security.”

  I tried to hide the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The last thing mankind needed was to make the mighty galaxy spanning Nisk mad at us. We had enough trouble with the Matarons constantly plotting our destruction. It explained why Trask and his two clean skins were using armor piercing slugs, not to kill Sorvino but to eliminate any bugs that got in their way. Considering how many billions of Nisk were scurrying around just below the surface, ripping a few security drones apart took crazy guts, and they’d gotten away with it!

  “Are you sure they’re military?”

  “Analysis doubt none.”

  “We sell those things to anyone, human or not.”

  “Non humans have use none for weapons kinetic.”

  Maybe not, but our primitive kinetic weapons had taken down two of their combat drones before they even knew what was happening. “Can you prove humans fired those slugs?”

  “Knowledge none. Proof none. Sensors disrupted. Field interference active at five-intersect-twenty-one.”

  A cold chill ran down my spine. “What kind of interference field?”