Chapter 10: Improvise, adapt, overcome

Adam. 10

“Most esteemed members of the council,” Adam bowed long and deep as he stood in the center of the Chambers of the Imperium high council. One seat was conspicuously empty. “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”

“We are always grateful to our guardians in the ISD, Mister Doncaster,” Joseph Bird, the minister of Public information - the propaganda agency - said on his right. The council was arranged around a hollow circle, each member sitting at their own curved bench, forming a ring, and all of them facing toward its center where Adam was standing. He supposed there was probably some sort of symbolism there, but it was lost on him. “Although it is well within the remit of the head of the ISD to call such a council meeting,” Bird went on, “It is highly unusual.”

“Yes,” Adam nodded. “And if it were for any other circumstance, I would hesitate to trouble you. But unfortunately, this cannot wait.”

Bird, suitably satisfied with the answer, nodded and gestured for him to continue.

“It is my sad and solemn duty to report to you that Sandra White, the Minister for Internal Security, is dead.” He waited for the shocked gasps and dumbfounded looks to wash around the surviving council members before he continued. “Minister White, as you may or may not know - and as is the right for any member of this estimable body - was a very private person. For that reason, she refused the repeated requests made by my department to assign a security detail to her home, instead relying on...” Adam paused, making a show of choosing his words carefully, which, of course, he wasn’t doing. He had rehearsed this speech a hundred times in the last twenty-four hours. “... private security contractors. Two of the men chosen to guard her estate were tied to the Dardanelles Crime Syndicate. Investigations are still ongoing, but it appears that an attempt was made to kidnap the Minister; she resisted and was killed as a result of her heroism.”

Isagora Doukas, the Minister for Defense, made a noise that was half scoff and half scowl. “You are going to have to do much better than that!” He barked. “Start from the beginning!”

Adam, holding Doukas’s eyes for long enough to convey the message that he was not a man easily intimidated, nodded and took a deep breath. “The ISD has been tasked with investigating any potential security breaches that led to the loss of the 381st Marine Division at Garros II...”

“What has that got to do with anything?!?” Doukas glared at him.

“If I am allowed to finish, I will tell you,” Adam answered back, meeting and matching Doukas’s stare. He waited in silence long enough for the Minister to wave a hand for him to continue. Still holding Doukas’s eyes, he resumed his prepared monologue. “There were only two possible places the rebels could have acquired the information necessary to pull off an attack of this scale: internally or through hacking. As sickening as the idea of a traitor within our ranks is to all of us, it was a possibility that had to be looked into. Fortunately, everyone with access to that information has shown themselves to be beyond reproach.”

“That is something, I suppose,” Bird nodded, listening carefully.

“Indeed,” Adam said, turning to face the man. “That left only the possibility that our security systems were infiltrated by an outside party. The number of people and organizations capable of doing that is extremely limited. But, for the sake of prudence, I made the decision to investigate all of them. It was while looking at the Dardenelles Syndicate that we discovered the plan to abduct Minister White.”

“White was murdered by the same people who betrayed our Marines?” Jasmine Mavinda, the Minister for Health and Education, gasped.

“No. My apologies; I should have been clearer. The Syndicate, as far as we can tell at this time, had no involvement in what happened to the 381st Division. I merely gave this information to explain why we were looking at them at all.”

“I see,” Mavinda nodded, looking unsurprisingly relieved. “Please continue.”

“The plot was very detailed; we knew the names of her guards and the names of the people who had ordered the operation, and also what the Minister’s guards had been ordered to do. But it was also moving very rapidly, meaning there was very little time between the order being given and the Syndicate expecting it actually to happen. We tried making contact with Minister White...” Of course, they hadn’t; they had killed her, but fabricating retroactive comms logs was child’s play. “ ... but there was no response. Fearing that we were already too late, we contacted the Florence main Police Department and ordered them to surround the Minister’s Estate. We considered ordering them to storm the compound, but the guards had been ordered to execute Minister White and then kill themselves if they thought they would be caught. So Florence PD was to establish a perimeter and detain anyone who left the estate, while also keeping out of sight. I personally led an infiltration team to storm the estate.” That part had been true, sort of. The Florence PD really had been ordered to secure the estate about half an hour after he and Dom had put the bodies into position inside it. The pair had then just moved a few miles away, waited the appropriate amount of time, then came back. Flight logs and transponder codes for their shuttle were even easier to fabricate than comm logs, at least to him.

“Personally?” Bird tilted his head. “The head of the ISD putting himself in harm’s way? Is that normal operating procedure?”

“No, of course not,” Adam rolled his eyes. “But this wasn’t some run-of-the-mill hostage situation, either. I have personally led countless such operations in the past, and if anything went wrong - as it ultimately did - the buck would stop with me regardless. So if that was the case, I would lead the mission personally to give it the greatest chance of success.”

With something approaching an impressed look on his face, Bird nodded, and Adam was allowed to keep talking.

“It took less than twenty minutes for my team and I to reach the Minister’s Estate, at which time we made entry. The guards were caught by surprise but opened fire as soon as they were confronted; both of them were killed, but...” he took another deep breath. “Minister White was already dead. She was found in her shower room. There were signs of a struggle, and she had been executed by a single laser shot to the head, but the estimated time of death suggests that she had been dead for an hour or more before we even became aware of the situation. There was never a chance that we would have made it in time.”

There was silence in the council chambers for a few moments. Joseph Bird was the first to speak. “Do we know what the Syndicate wanted with her?”

Adam paused for a moment, another part of the act. He had predicted that question, too. “There is nothing specific in the information we have recovered so far, but the working theory is that she would either be ransomed back to the council or interrogated for classified information. Fortunately, the Minister was a woman of loyalty and integrity. It seems very unlikely that she gave them anything, and on learning that the plan wouldn’t work, the guards were ordered to kill her.”

“How can you be so sure?” Doukas asked, his voice a little calmer than it had been at the beginning of the meeting. “How do you know she didn’t sing like a canary and then was killed to cover their tracks.”

“Two reasons, Minister,” Adam answered the once again expected question. “Firstly, there wasn’t time. There were less than ninety minutes between the order being given and our arrival on the scene. It would have taken a lot longer than that for the guards to get anything useful out of Minister White. Second of all, the fact that the guards were still there. It is inconceivable that they would have attempted the interrogation at the estate when any number of Minister White’s staff could have turned up and interrupted things. It is vastly more likely that they killed her in the attempt to secure her and were trying to cover their tracks when we found them.”

Silence once again fell around the room. Adam waited for the inevitable. As predicted, it was the ever-hostile Doukas who finally gave it voice. “And what do you think your punishment should be for this failure?” He asked, trying to sound menacing while he drummed his fingers on the table.

“And what failure would that be?”

“The fucking Minister of Internal Security is dead!” he yelled, his face going red under the exertion. “Whose fault do you think that is?!?”

“Yours,” Adam responded flatly.

Doukas spluttered so hard it seemed like he was going to choke on his own tongue.

“Mine?!?”

“Yes, yours. All of yours,” Adam answered again. “I have been warning this council for years that your positions of power do not make you immune to the machinations of traitors and criminals; if anything, it makes you more vulnerable to them. I have requested - numerous times - to increase your security detail and to put your protection under the direct remit of the ISD, and repeatedly, you have refused. There is only one council member who has taken that advice, and that is Miss Mavinda. Each and every single one of you receives an average of thirty thousand death threats... per week, and that is the people who are dumb enough to tell us what the plans would be. There are countless more threats coming from people intelligent enough not to pre-warn us. Did you think they were all bluffing? Did you think that your position on the council made you immune to firearms or made your estates into impenetrable fortresses, or did you think you were untouchable simply by virtue of your position? Do you think - like Minister White clearly did - that having unvetted, untrained, and unaccountable private security companies guarding you somehow made you safer than loyal and able members of the ISD or the military? You were told - repeatedly - that this could happen, and you ignored it. The fault for this lies with Minister White and the rest of you who think you are above...” he almost said it, he very nearly said “above reproach,” but stopped himself at the last minute. “ ... above the mortal dangers that all people in power face.”

Doukas was clearly not a man used to being challenged. His eyes were bulging out of his head incredulously, and his face was red enough to make Adam wonder if he had burst a blood vessel. But Adam didn’t care; Adam was a man who did the intimidating, he was practically immune to being on the receiving end. With Sandra White dead, he no longer answered to the council but directly to the Emperor, at least until a new Minister for Internal Security was selected. Until then, there was damn near nothing they could do to him. “Once again,” he continued. “I strongly urge this council to heed the advice of the ISD and drastically increase your security details with guards from trustworthy agencies! There is zero doubt in my mind that this could all have been avoided if this advice had been given the serious consideration it should have been. Anything less than that, and the ISD is powerless to protect any of you from the same thing happening again.”

Doukas looked like he was about to go nuclear, but a raised hand from Bird shut him up. “Given recent events and the fate of our fallen friend, we will certainly consider your recommendations, Mister Doncaster.”

“Thank you, Minister.”

“What are you going to do about the Syndicate responsible for this travesty?” Minister Mavinda asked after tensions seemed to settle a little.

“That is a decision for the council,” Adam answered. “It is my recommendation that they be completely purged.” Adam knew that those words could potentially doom hundreds, maybe thousands of people to death, but the Dardanelles Crime Syndicate was a cancer on the planet. Human trafficking, the smuggling of narcotics, dealing with harvested organs, prostitution, extortion, racketeering, kidnapping, stellar piracy; it was an organization with powerful friends that deserved merciless hell to be rained down on them. Adam wanted to see them wiped from the Earth, but those powerful friends were still around, despite the damning evidence that Adam had flawlessly fabricated ... and one of them spoke up.

“Let’s not be hasty with lethal consequences without due consideration, then,” Marcus Bellford, the weasel-like Minister of Finance, chirped up. “The Syndicates, as distasteful as they are, provide a service that cannot be garnered through official means. Their methods disgust me, but they are effective at what they do, and they keep the coffers filled.”

“Unless that’s guarding you while you sleep,” Adam added, holding the Minister’s eyes. “The files containing categoric proof of this conspiracy will be sent to the entire council as soon as this meeting is finished. But I will leave their ultimate fate up to you.”

Adam’s eyes returned to Doukas. He was sure the aging council member would still be seething at Adam’s insolence, but instead, he was gawking at Bellford as if the man had spontaneously grown a second head. “Are you fucking shitting me??” he raged. “They kill a member of this council, and you are worried about a few fucking credits?!?”

“Perfect, fight amongst yourselves like good little cretins,” Adam thought to himself as he watched Bellford suddenly look very uncomfortable under the rest of the council’s withering gaze. “Your time will come soon enough. I’ll line each one of you up next to your friend for what you’ve done.”

He cleared his throat, granting Bellford a thoroughly undeserved reprieve from the collective scrutiny of the rest of the council. “As I’m sure you can all appreciate, this investigation, along with the continued efforts to find the source of the intelligence briefing that led to the massacre of the 381st, is the top priority for my division. I would be grateful if the council could inform me when you come to the decision regarding the Dardanelles Syndicate. Otherwise, I need to get back to my investigation.”

Doukas and Bellford, each still trying valiantly to stare the other into submission, just grunted but didn’t look his way. Bird was watching them with something close to a look of exasperation on his face, but he didn’t answer either. It was only Mavinda who gave him the courtesy of a response. “Mister Doncaster, it fills me with pride and confidence to know that you are working to keep the Imperium secure in these difficult times. But please, I would request that you take no further actions like the one to lead the rescue of Minister White, it would be a staggering loss to this council and the people we lead to lose you to such ... reckless bravery.”

“I appreciate your concern, Minister.”

“As I appreciate your diligence,” she smiled. “I wonder - if it wouldn’t be an imposition - if I could visit you at the ISD compound in a few days. There are things I would like to discuss with you regarding the security detail concerns you have raised.”

Adam managed to stifle a frown. Although Jasmine Mavinda had been the only one of the council to accept the security changes, she hadn’t exactly done so without protest and had never shown the slightest interest in speaking to him before. But still, a chance to speak to her may be a chance to get more information. “It would be my honor to host you, Minister,” he replied with a short bow.

“Then I look forward to seeing you. I will have my office send an official request later today.”

Adam nodded again and then vanished from view as the holographic conferencing program disconnected.

Stepping off the small podium in his office, he sighed, walked wearily around his desk, and dropped into his chair. The operation to construct the crime scene with Dom had been remarkably, almost comically easy. The irony was that it was so easy because the council had never heeded his years-old recommendations regarding their security detail. If they had, it wouldn’t have made the operation impossible, but it would have made it infinitely more difficult. He and Dom had literally driven a panel van, with three bodies in the back, right up to her front door and unloaded them inside and into position without a single person even noticing them, let alone stopping them. They had dumped Sandra’s body into her ensuite bathroom, the same place they had found her the previous day - intentionally dumped to make it look like she had fallen from a standing position - and then laid the guards out behind partial cover in the hallway, fired their weapons around a few times to simulate a short firefight, and then called it a job done. To be fair, they could have left the guards there all along, but there was no guarantee that nobody wouldn’t have stopped by and raised the alarm while Adam was busy. There wasn’t any need to fuck around with fake blood evidence, either. Close range laser fire usually flash-boiled blood into nothingness and cauterized the wounds to stop much more flowing out once the person was dead. Besides, only the ISD would ever see the actual crime scene pictures, and he would make sure no further questions were asked.

All in all, it had been a good, if massively disturbing, day’s work.

“So, it’s done,” Dom asked. He had been sitting on the opposite desk chair the whole time and had heard everything with the council.

Adam looked at him for a moment before sighing again. This was the part he hadn’t been looking forward to at all. He opened one of his desk drawers, reached inside, pulled out a laser pistol, and set it on the desk, resting his hand on top of it. Dom swallowed hard and looked at the weapon. “I want you to tell me what happens next,” Adam finally said.

“I’m guessing that you kill me; I’m a witness, I know too much ... I’m a loose end.”

“Are you?”

“Sir?”

“Dom, you and I have done something together that is going to require a lifetime of unbreakable trust. You see, if you decide to have a change of heart tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or a decade down the road, what do you think will happen?”

“They’ll kill you, for sure.”

“Well, yes, obviously,” Adam held the man’s eyes. “Be more specific.”

“I mean...” Dom frowned, “They would probably torture you some as well.”

“No,” Adam said after it was clear Dom was out of ideas. “I mean, yes, you’re right, but you are missing the much bigger picture. First, they will want information on who else was involved. Considering you would be the one who told them, they would already know about you, but they would still want to be sure. They would torture me to find out. That torture wouldn’t be waterboarding or pulling out fingernails; they would find my weak points and use them against me ... that is my family. They would torture them, my wife, my children, and they would make me watch. They would assume that they wouldn’t know anything; I’m not stupid enough to have told them; it would just be another way to punish me. I have seen it done, so you don’t just have to take my word for it. They would skin them alive in front of my eyes; they would break every bone in their bodies, and they would bathe them in acid while injecting them with drugs to keep them alive, conscious, and feeling everything. I have heard those screams before, and there is no reality in which I would let that happen. They wouldn’t stop at just my wife and children, though. Parents, Aunts, Uncles, Brothers, Sisters, Nephews, Nieces, Cousins, Friends, colleagues ... they would go after everyone. Only after the last of them had been allowed to die in front of my eyes would they do the same to me. I don’t care about me; I do care about them, and I will kill the Emperor himself before I allow that to happen to them.

“But here is the part you are missing. They would do the same to your family too, your friends, all of them, Everyone you have ever cared about. Even if you ran to them and told them everything ... even if I told them you tried to stop me, which I wouldn’t do. You were involved; you are guilty. Now, If you are the sort of man willing to sacrifice your family, let alone mine, I can just kill you here. Otherwise, you and I are going to have to come to some sort of agreement. So I will ask you again. Are you a loose end? Or are you an ally?”

Dom held his eye for a moment. “Permission to speak freely, Sir.”

“I insist on it.”

“You have read my file, right?”

“I have.”

“So you know what I did before I joined the ISD.”

Adam’s eye twitched. That part had been expunged, but given what the man had been expected to do in his role for the Agency, he had assumed it was some sort of prison sentence. More than likely for some kind of violent offense. Having such a glaring hole in his knowledge about the man had been frustrating to Adam, but he had at least been able to ascertain that he didn’t hold loyalties to anyone Adam would consider hostile.

“I was a Marine.”

“There is no record of you having ever served in the military.”

“Not under this name, no.”

Adam clenched his jaw. That was a rookie mistake. Of course, the ISD gave him a new identity when they recruited him. Adam, having only worked there, had never needed one, but a fair number of black book operators had needed one just to get them through the door.

“What is your old name?”

“Domonic Matthews. Serial number Foxtrot, Four, zero, six, one, kilo, zulu one alpha.”

Adam, keeping one eye on Dom and sliding the weapon a little further out of his reach, typed the name and service number into his computer. In an instant, a heavily redacted service record popped onto his screen. Of course, his Administrator level clearance did away with all the redactions, but there was no mistaking the man in the picture. He looked younger and smaller, and there was a pride behind his eyes, but it was definitely Dom. He scanned the man’s file. Five years as an infantryman, then promoted to sergeant before being transferred to special forces, then more than three dozen successful missions, fourteen of which he had led. It wasn’t a wildly impressive service record, but it certainly wasn’t a bad one. It showed him to be a capable and trustworthy soldier, exactly the sort the ISD would have wanted to recruit, and no ties at all to any ciminal activity.

“What White and her people did to my team after the op to kill Frank was unforgivable, but...” Dom sighed, his shoulders slumping. “I am a Marine, Sir; it’s who I am. I may not be in the corps anymore, but the corps is still part of me. I may never be able to walk into a vet bar and drink with my brothers, but they are my brothers nonetheless, and what those people did to them was worse. They just killed fifteen thousand of them on a whim. I am in this to the end, with or without your threats.”

Adam held Dom’s gaze for a few more moments before nodding and sliding the pistol over the desk to him. “We’re in this together. We are going to have to rely on each other in a way that even the Marine Corps would consider excessive. Our trust in each other is going to have to be absolute. The stakes are too high.” He nodded down at the gun. “You’re going to need that; there’s no telling if people are still after you for being part of the hit team.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

Adam laughed. “Don’t thank me yet, Soldier. I have buried you up to your eyebrows in a whole heap of shit. There’s no guarantee at all that we are getting out of this alive.”

Dom nodded and took the weapon, barely giving it a glance as he tucked it into his pocket. “Sir?”

“Yes?”

“What the fuck are we going to do about Orpheus?”

Adam sighed again. “I have no idea. But we have to do something.”

Almark. 12

Walking hurt, not as much as it had done a few days ago, but there was more than a little ache shooting through her legs and up into her spine every time she put her full weight onto either one of her legs. But she could do it. It was tolerable, and considering that the alternative was to have lost both of her legs completely - if she had survived at all - she was more than happy to deal with a little discomfort for a while.

At least, she hoped it was for a while. In the two weeks or so since the crash onto the beach, she had been able to see a marked improvement in her condition almost every day. From screaming, gut-wrenching agony, to intense pain, to moderate pain, to mild pain, to just aching discomfort, there had been a profound and consistent improvement in her condition every day, but that seemed to have tapered off, and the last few days had been the same. Dr Evans said that she would recover her full mobility with no lasting pain and that it would just take a little while longer, but Emylee wasn’t afraid to admit that her confidence in that prognosis was starting to wane.

She had taken to the ‘brute force and optimism’ approach, forcing herself to walk a dozen laps of her room a few times a day; it wasn’t quite as much of a ‘smile through the pain’ thing as it was a ‘grit your teeth until a dentist yells at you, but get on with it’ approach. Either way, it was working. Slowly, yes, but working nonetheless. Each lap of her room became a little faster and a little easier; her legs didn’t feel like they were fighting her quite as much. It still hurt like a fucking bitch, but the ease of moving around was going a little way to countering her concern over the lingering pain.

Considering the number of people coming in and out of the hospital ward when she had still been in there, each of them dealing with varying degrees of missing limbs and each of them in a considerably worse condition than she was, she could easily take her current circumstances as a win.

Of course, she had other reasons to be happy, too. Things with Mac were going great. Better than great. It had taken him a little while to be convinced that she wasn’t interested in him because of some misguided hero worship, nor was she trying to thank him for helping her so much. That had taken a few days, but the first time she had taken him into her mouth, moaning deeply at the feel of his fingers stroking through her hair, the feel of his prominent veins bulging against his considerable shaft, and - finally - the euphoric joy she felt at tasting her man for the first time as he grunted and twitched his release onto her tongue ... yeah, he didn’t seem so concerned after that.

Mac was ... different from any other guy she had dated. By outward appearances, he was a meathead. A mountain of a man who looked like he hung around in dark alleys just so he could be the sort of guy you wouldn’t want to bump into in one. He had the capacity for unspeakable violence; she had seen and heard about that much on the beach, and even other Marines - people who knew of Mac through reputation alone - treated him with an air of respect that was only reserved for the most capable of warriors. Only Stevo seemed to get more of that treatment. By the way he looked alone, he was the sort of guy who, had she seen him in a bar, she would have made a conscious effort to stay away from him.

And had she done so, she would have been a fucking idiot.

Mac was a mammoth of a man, god damn huge in every imaginable way. They had spent a night together a few days ago, just sitting on the sofa in his cabin and watching a holo-movie together. At some point, her hand had found its way into his. She had been so focused on how his hand seemed to effortlessly swallow hers in his gargantuan grip that she had completely lost her place in the movie. They were hands so big and so powerful that she wondered if he could actually crush a skull in their grip if he put his mind to it. Yet, he held her hand as if it were the most delicate and precious thing in his entire world. That was the part she would have missed out on.

For all his size, for all his strength, and for all his capability for violence, there was a gentleness about him that defied all first impressions. The only comparison she could think of was to picture Mac as a rampaging barbarian, kicking down the gates of ancient Rome and marauding through the streets, butchering enemy soldiers and tearing down buildings with equal ease, drenched in sweat and grime and the blood of his enemies ... and then stopping, mid rampage, to pick a flower for her. His tenderness was completely at odds with everything else about his outward appearance, but the more time she spent with him, the more she realized that the tender side of Mac was the real side of him. It was guarded, buried deep inside him, probably as the result of some heartless bitch who had hurt him in the past, but it was there. And she totally fucking melted whenever he showed it to her.

After everything that had happened, the fate of her wing, the loss of her friends, the pain and the anguish of her injuries, the sting of betrayal by the Imperium ... After all that shit, he made her feel safe. What had started out as a curious attraction had very quickly developed into something a lot more, not that she had the courage to give voice to that just yet. Telling a guy you were developing real feelings for him after less than a week would make her look fucking crazy. The funny part of it, though, is that she was starting to get those little sparks of jealousy brimming up inside her.