Squire Of The Land - Part Three
05 Oct 2018Cernig10
She shifted slowly in her rocky nest, ever so slightly, testing muscles against each other so that they wouldn’t get stiff and hamper her escape. Above her, a stretch of a military-grade fabric, its color electronically matched to the rock, warmed to the exact temperature of the surrounding rocks to keep her safe from detection on infrared while its carbon buckyball weave deflected any radar. Compulsively, she re-checked the settings on her GalSpec 109 sniper rifle - an automatic rifle using actual bullets rather than her preferred laser weapon, but with a combination silencer/flash suppressor fitted it gave higher odds of survivability, of escape to resume her cover position as secretary to the Factor of Savere Landing on the planet Celsius.Margaret Sinclair was in reality a deep-cover operative of Harris Corporation who had been highly trained in surveillance, unarmed combat, assassination, and espionage since the age of twelve. Her ability as a secretary was undoubted, but was the result of deep skill implantation using new techniques developed by Harris Corp. based on the simulated reality immersions used by the disciples of Pranav Antal. She’d been placed into the small farming town’s administrative staff following its turnover to the Praetorians and had decided to make herself indispensable to its new Sir, who was an obvious rising star in the Imperial faction’s hierarchy, so that she could gather intelligence from within; but she also had superiors who could change all that and now that she’d met Jack Cernig-Dix she agreed he would be a perfect political target, high-profile enough to send a resounding message to those who would know its meaning.
She’d been ordered to kill ‘Sir Jack’ by way of a dead-drop from her contact. Cernig-Dix was born in an Alliance system but had converted to the Imperial cause, he was by PCA standards a wide-eyed reformist, and he had a considerable media profile as a businessman and reality holo-vid star. His death at the hands of an assassin would tell others that joining the PCA could be fatal, would mean media reports across the galaxy, and drive the Praetorians into a paranoid security crackdown while ensuring that their handling of their slaves become even more harsh. All of which would make gathering external support easier while making internal revolts far more likely.
A rising cloud of dust rising against the fiery glow of a long Celsius sunset warned of the approach of the Knight’s transport and its escort vehicles. Sinclair re-checked her rifle again and settled down to wait for her shot.
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“That’s it ahead, Sir, the last stop for today.” the driver yelled over the noise as the single light, wheeled APC the town guard possessed bumped over the dusty track cut deep into the landscape. There was no point in trying to lay proper roads in an environment as exposed to extremes of hot and cold as Celsius, they didn’t last more than a couple of cycles of the long days and nights. Captain Robert Odell, riding shotgun, nodded and looked over his shoulder into the rear compartment. His three other Manor Guards were shaking themselves down, re-checking kit and sub-machine guns, as they should be. The newly-promoted Sir Jack Cernig-Dix had given up trying to read his notes from his data-pad as the APC jolted and jounced over the rough dirt track to his furthest farming unit and was now gazing out a view-slit as the small clump of mostly-buried structures came into sight ahead.
An odd man, Odell thought to himself. He couldn’t decide yet whether the Knight was on a vanity project bankrolled by his wealth, in it for the advantages it gave his business concerns, or was a true convert to a rarely-attained vision of an ideal Imperial society. Maybe a bit of all three. He seemed to care about the people newly under his lordship as a matter of good business policy, being warmly encouraging when he met both high and low but with no tolerance for incompetence or venality. Today, he’d seen the man struggle under Celsius’ heavier gravity and higher air pressure yet keep a smile on his face when he had to be dead on his feet. His need to understand even the smallest parts of the small town’s operation, from kelp farming, to fishing, to the growing of short-cycle grains, seemed almost obsessive and he made copious notes on his personal datapad.At every stop he’d repeated the same message: corruption would be found and rooted out, he’d be investing his own money into his holding’s social and commercial infrastructure, life would be better for everyone under Imperial rule. He’d ordered deliveries of clothing and schoolbooks, checked that Imperial Slaves were well cared for and that their children were schooled with those of citizens, made notes of what each hamlet or fishing vessel needed in the way of new equipment and promised he’d arrange their provision as an investment that would return to him in higher overall profits from the manorage.
This last stop was another tiny hamlet, this one rearing mixed herds of goats and alpine sheep on the rocky foothills at the far Eastern end of the manorage lands, well inland from the town itself. As the APC pulled to a stop, Odell could see the usual marks of a Celsius farming community. Small fields closely surrounded the clutch of homes and farm buildings; places to grow vegetables and millet, or to graze the ubiquitous Celsius Guinea Pigs, a hardy variety of the rodent with its roots in the large cuy breeds of Terra’s Peruvian mountains. The homes themselves were low, dome-shaped, ferrocrete constructs, partly sunken into the ground and covered by a thick layer of dirt and turf. They were occupied by a handful of citizens - one or two families usually - and their Imperial Slave farmhands. Further out, goats were shepherded by more slaves, almost always native born because such long exposure to Celsius’ hot days would kill off-worlders in short order.
The entire hamlet had turned out to see the new Knight, except the herdsmen of course. Two little girls in flouncy white dresses carried bouquets of flowers, while a woman who was obviously the senior citizen stood between them bearing a tray on which sat the now-expected welcoming meal of barbequed pig and millet beer. As the APC’s side door opened, a wave of dry heat hit its occupants. It was late in the Celsius evening, which was five standard-days long, but the temperature was still in the low forties centigrade. Sir Jack stepped forward to give his now-practised wave and smile of greeting, and then things happened very fast.
One of the guardsmen, perhaps made clumsy by a long day of heat and dust, dropped his helmet as he rose to put it on. It fell to the metal floor of the vehicle with a loud clatter. Jack turned at the noise - and then the left side of his head just above the ear exploded in a spray of blood which coated the hapless guardsman’s face! There was the whining, bone-tingling sound of a ricochet, and another of the guards folded at the knees, clutching his chest. As Sir Jack fell into the APC, another impact bowed his back and a bloom of bright red showed there, low on his right side.Odell willfully forced himself to move past the shocked ringing in his ears, hitting the emergency button to close the APCs door and yelling “Sniper! The Knight is hit!” at the driver, who gunned the big engine and accelerated again while yelling into his own communications circuit to the guard barracks back in Selene Landing itself, some twenty five kilometers away. Shit, Odell thought, If this guy dies Kaira will eat me alive!
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“So we hightailed it and called in skimmer support, my Lord. They missed her too but one of my patrols got lucky as she re-entered Landing. They caught her coming up through a drainage channel and here was a firefight. She got one of my men in the leg and gut, he’s here in the infirmary too, but a grenade must’ve blown some rock debris into her eyes and blinded her, and the other three took her alive but shocked and wounded from grenade fragments.” Odell told the scruffy and bearded man who had appeared from nowhere, looking like a middle-aged dockworker in a knitted cap, shabby greatcoat and scuffed boots, and had produced I.D. confirming he was in fact Baron Bartolomeo Bedell, sometime Grand Master of the PCA’s loyal pilots and currently Duke Rowe’s senior field intelligence operative.
Sir Bart nodded slowly. “Very well, Captain. Write me up a report and get it to me by the start of next nayan. You’re dismissed.” He pulled of his knitted cap and rubbed his bald head, something he did when deep in thought. The Baron had been tracking rumors for Duke Rowe, rumors of scientific projects that had made the Duke very nervous and paranoid indeed. One of the threads had led to Savere Landing so he’d been flown in by one of his old corsair contacts, a smuggler who often transported people who would rather not have the ship they were travelling in be scanned by law enforcement. Working undercover on a fishing boat was hard work, but his cybernetics had gotten him through where that work in this gravity would have ruined another man. The crewmen talked, and one night he’d seen the flares of starship engines way out to sea, and he’d seen enough to know tales of weapon shipments coming on-planet from Harris Corporation were true. They were going to start a revolt, and that was a more immediate threat than the Duke’s fears. Then this. Maybe the two threads were tangled after all.
Cernig-Dix had survived the attack, if only just. He was just down the corridor, floating in a tank of nutrient while the medical staff used progenitor treatments to rebuild his liver, his skull, and part of the left side of his brain. They said over time and with the right treatments his brain would re-establish most of its neural connections. He’d regain almost all of what he was, certainly all his intellect, but there’d be memory gaps - most likely in older memories. Lucky bastard, Bart thought. Unlike Knight-Commander Jack Cernig-Dix , Bart’s body wouldn’t accept progenitor treatments; hence he looked middle-aged when only in his late forties and hence his considerable cybernetic augmentation.
The would-be assassin had survived too, although she’d taken the life of one of Cernig-Dix’s guards today. She too floated in a nutrient tank, currently in an induced deep sleep. The Baron turned and walked into her infirmary room, nodding to the two regular PCA infantry guards on duty there - part of an entire company flown in to augment the town’s security. Across Celsius, other units large and small were bolstering town guards and police forces and the entire planet was under a heightened security alert. He spoke abruptly to the doctor and nurse who were tending Sinclair. “Wake her up, start the honesty drip,then get out. I’ll send for you when I’m done.”
Bart pulled a chair up to sit at the head of the tank and waited. Margaret Sinclair was good. The slim brunette didn’t show any sign at all as she came back to consciousness, not even a flicker of her eyelids. Of course, she couldn’t move below the neck right now.
“Greetings, Miss Sinclair, if that’s really your name. I know you aren’t surprised to find you’re paralysed from the neck down. I had a neural block implanted in your spine to block your various interesting cyberware implants and keep you secure. I also had the cortex bomb in your head removed, so you can stop frantically thinking that code sequence, it’ll do no good. You may remember that you are currently blind. The doctors tell me that it is permanent unless you are given immediate progenitor treatments to regenerate the tissue and optic nerves.”
He paused a moment to let that sink in, then:
“You also certainly know that you’ll be imprisoned for the rest of your life. Death would make you a martyr to your cause, and I’ve no intention of providing any such spark. So, I’ll make this clear. You can either stay silent, blind and be incarcerated, or speak up and at least be able to see the four walls that will contain you.”
He sat back and waited, the silence broken only by the hum and beep of medical machinery. The drip the doctor had started before he left contained a potent mixture of the neurochemical inhibitors known galaxy-wide as “honesty pills”, which made her unable to lie even to herself by blocking the very neural pathways used in lying. It also contained some other ingredients, illegal on many worlds, that softened the subjects resolve and enhanced their sense of anxiety and fear. It almost always worked.
Finally, Sinclair sighed.
“My real name is Yvonne White, I was recruited and trained from an early age by Harris Corp…”
Baron Bart smiled as the spy continued to talk, with his occasional prompts. Yes, the threads were very tangled up indeed.