The expansion box set, p.9
The Expansion Box Set, page 9
part #1 of The Expansion Series
“Commander Brandt,” the lead admiral announced loudly, “for your failure of leadership indirectly causing the death of the one hundred and thirty-three people mentioned, you are hereby demoted to the rank of lieutenant commander effective immediately. Your status as CP has been revoked and all the incumbent privileges that go along with both rank and status are now denied to you. You will receive orders when they have been drawn up and you are forfeit one year’s pay.” He picked up the gavel and tapped it once almost lazily on the wooden top of their raised table before the clerk called for them all to rise once more. The three admirals shuffled out of the room after the shortest court-martial any of them had ever experienced.
Brandt turned to Nance, the younger officer’s eyes wide with shock. She patted him on the shoulder.
“Good job,” she told him.
“I didn’t…” he stammered.
“I know, but a win is a win. Don’t look too hard at it.” She stepped away from the desk and turned to see the fine features of Commander Morello looking curiously at her. She remembered herself and saluted.
“You’ve been a junior rank to me for less than half a minute,” he said kindly. “You can dispense with the salutes and the Sirs for now.”
Brandt dropped her hand and allowed a small smile to cross her face, despite the devastatingly fatal blow her career had just suffered. “Sir, may I see that report?”
“Sadly, no,” Morello told her with a mischievous smile of his own. “One of the conditions of the report was that it was not to reach open court and has been destroyed now. No mention of it will be in the official records of the hearing.” Brandt looked confused and disappointed. “What I can permit you to do, however,” Morello said, “is join me for dinner later.”
Brandt’s eyes narrowed, assessing the ground for signs of an ambush.
“So…” she began slowly and suspiciously, “you just prosecuted me and demoted me, had me transferred off-world probably forever and now you want to buy me dinner?”
“Hey, I never said I was buying…” he answered with his hands out to his sides.
“Condition of agreement,” she told him, “I pick the place and you pick up the check.”
“Agreed,” he laughed. “Corner of Third and East Forty-Second, right?” He chuckled at her horrified expression. “Relax, I sent the transport to collect you.”
She screwed her mouth up a little as she thought. “Eight-thirty.”
“I’ll pick you up,” he agreed.
“No, meet me there at eight-thirty and we’ll walk.”
Morello agreed before turning back to her, wearing an apologetically awkward look. “One more thing…” He reached out and gently unclipped the shield badge from her uniform, reaching into his pocket and coming out with the three-starred emblem of her newly demoted rank.
“Had that one planned in advance, huh?” she asked him.
10
Lower East Side, NYC
Brandt changed out of her clothes at the headquarters building, cheating the system by requisitioning fresh PT gear from the gym there and bagging her uniform to be cleaned and collected whenever she had need of it again, which she suspected would probably be never. Wearing the gray jogging suit and white sneakers with the UNPF logo on made her feel a little less conspicuous than the crisp, white dress uniform complete with medals.
She was not a native New Yorker, not by a thousand miles, but it was where she based herself whenever she was on extended periods of leave. A couple of times Brandt had travelled to the southwest to visit with Jake or to the Virginia coast with Paterson, but not having any real family home herself—she didn’t get along with her mother—she had chosen the oddly comfortable yet seemingly inhospitable city as the place where her soul belonged.
She walked the route back, crossing the bridge and running her fingertips over the plaque before hitting the street feeling almost a little refreshed. She had gone to her court martial with all the dignity she possessed, expecting to be facing a sanction on a sliding scale somewhere between a dishonorable discharge and life imprisonment. Now it was possible she would spend the rest of her service guarding the shower block on night duty on a base with only five people on and being perpetually stuck in a rank where she would never fully be in command ever again.
But at least, she told herself, she was still in the service.
With the terror threats escalating daily, it was unlikely that she would be based somewhere that was so safe it would be boring, but she knew that high-profile assignments were never going to come her way again. The best she could hope for would likely be a punishment posting.
She put all of that out of her mind as she walked, taking in the sights and sounds and smells of the city. She had seen old movies depicting the place as a noisy, bustling place. There had been areas where everyone walked in fear of being robbed and others where some of the biggest transfers of wealth took place just blocks away.
She experienced none of that now, and only the thrum of repulser and thruster engines stirred the air above the comings and goings of the people at street level. So much of what went on in the cities happened way above ground level but there was something about the street that made her feel… connected. She took her time, wandering back to her hotel and musing about the strange turn of events the day had taken. She checked her watch, calculating the hours she had left before she had to get herself showered and ready to go out. She had time for a nap first.
Who knows? She thought. It might be a late night.
Dressed in a simple black top and matching jeans, Brandt stepped out onto the sidewalk and sucked in a lungful of city air through her nose. It wasn’t warm, but neither was it cold enough to warrant a jacket. Her clothes were simple, functional, but their tight cut gave heavy hints to her physical attributes.
Dead on eight-thirty, Morello rounded the corner of Third to her left. He wore blue denim jeans under a white shirt and sports coat, blending the casual with the formal effortlessly. He wore it as well as he wore his dress uniform. His collared shirt was unbuttoned perhaps one button too many for her liking but his off-duty look emphasized his air of the charismatic Italian descendant.
Brandt took another breath and put on her winning smile.
“Commander,” she greeted him, offering him her hand to shake.
“Anthony, please,” he said as he leaned in to lightly kiss both cheeks in turn. Brandt felt her face flush as he did so, disarming her effectively. She fought down the unexpected urge to reply with “Ayy, Tony” like in classic gangster movies.
“Leslie,” she responded, feeling odd to go by her first name when every day of her life she was addressed either by rank, surname or callsign.
No callsign any more, she thought sourly before shaking it off.
“Leslie,” Morello repeated with a smile. “So, where are we going?”
“Just a little place I know nearby,” she told him. “Come on.”
She set off, jaywalking with impunity across the road in between the sparse traffic of small yellow and black transports. Morello followed, catching up easily within a few strides.
“You from here?” he asked conversationally. Something told her that he already knew she wasn’t, but she humored him with an answer anyway.
“No, I just like it here,” she told him, leaving out the fact that she had been saving to buy her own place there eventually. “You are though.”
“Born and raised. Grew up on Canal with a brother and a sister. Mother was in the service and father was a lawyer.” Brandt frowned internally at that, unsure why she felt the traditional role reversal was an issue. “Went to join straight after high school and got diverted into the UN Attorney’s staff. Did my law degree and been there ever since. Thirteen years now.”
“And there was me expecting some ‘son of the admiral’ story…”
“Hardly, not me anyway,” he laughed cryptically.
They walked in silence for a while, separating to dodge the oncoming pedestrians who threatened to break-up any conversation they struck up. They both moved like native city-dwellers: dodging and overtaking with ease as they gauged the speed of the oncoming human traffic. Brandt stopped by the edge of the sidewalk and smiled back at him before looking at a restaurant across the road. Morello’s face fell. He was looking through the window of a joint that boasted herbal tea and vegan bean burgers.
“I’m messing with you,” she said as she laughed at the obvious disappointment on his face. “I like my vegan bean burgers medium rare and made of prime beef.” She turned and looked behind her at the glass frontage of a dark steak bar before judging a gap in the flow of people and stepping through. Morello followed her inside, his senses instantly assaulted by the heady aromas of sizzled meat and frying garlic butter.
No matter what advances they made in food, from the three expanding pills that formed their twenty-four-hour field rations to the reconstruction of organic material with 3D printers, nothing would ever quite replace the smell and taste of perfectly cooked ribeye.
“Now you’re talkin’,” he said to her as he stepped up beside her.
The floor manager-cum-waiter swept over to them, nodding to Brandt with familiarity, and gestured for her to walk in the direction he dictated. His lips pursed, and his eyebrows rose as he cast an appraising look up and down Morello’s form. They sat in a booth, old red leather and dark wood surrounding them but probably all recently refurbished and carefully aged to look like an early twenty-first century steak joint. All around them were sections of carefully exposed brickwork to give the building an authentic feel, alongside subtle screens built into shallow recesses that cycled old pictures of the steak house in various stages throughout its long history.
“I didn’t know if we were going to see you again this time,” he said to her in a warm but haughty tone. “Thought you’d shipped out again, but instead I see you’ve brought your own prime sirloin with you?”
Morello, despite himself, blushed. Brandt laughed and gave no answer.
“Or is he dessert, honey?”
Brandt laughed again.
“He’s a work colleague,” she explained sternly as she smiled, closing off the conversation before it could devolve and embarrass the commander any more.
He held both hands up in surrender, then offered them both menus in small, leather-bound folders. Brandt didn’t open hers.
“Sirloin, medium rare, sweet potato fries and a salad,” she said.
“Usual for you,” the waiter said. “And you, sweetie?”
Morello cleared his throat in as manly a fashion as he could manage to cover his awkwardness as he scanned down the menu. It was one of those restaurants that was so confident in its expertise that it offered few variations. He chose the most mouthwatering option, trying not to calculate the costs involved.
“Ribeye,” he said as he snapped the old leather-bound menu shut. “Medium, and the same as my friend.”
Forty-nine credits for a steak? Tonight’s gonna cost me a couple hundred at least…
The waiter left with a flourish and a smirk to Brandt.
“You’re a regular then?” he asked her.
“Yeah, I hit this place at least once every time I’m home. I like it here.”
“You don’t get back west much?”
She stopped and watched his face, waiting for him to realize his mistake. His face stayed resolutely unfazed.
“Why west?” she asked carefully. “Why not anywhere else?”
“Because you’re not from here,” Morello told her, “and your accent is—”
“My accent is a mixture and doesn’t sound like the people in the town where I grew up. Didn’t my file tell you that?” she accused him quietly.
“No,” he admitted, “it didn’t.”
“So, are you going to tell me the real reason we’re here?” she pressed, forcing him to look around and lean in closer to speak in a hushed tone.
“UNID,” he said. It wasn’t clear whether he was with the intelligence directorate or just acting on their behalf. “I just wanted to be sure you understood the reasons behind what happened today.”
“I got busted down for screwing the pooch on an op. People died, it was my fault. I’m lucky not to be in jail. That’s what happened.”
“Not quite,” Morello said. “I need your word that what I am about to tell you is treated as classified information. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that acting on this privileged intelligence would be seen as an act of treason against the territory…”
Brandt’s eyes narrowed. She had seen the lawyer in him instantly as he used terminology like he would in a courtroom. The other curiosity was that breaching the confidentiality of the information he was willing to share with her would be seen as treason not to the UN, not to the combined territories, but to the territory. To the Americas. Her interest spiked and she nodded her assent.
“The terror attack on the government building in South Africa was a UNID cover,” he said. Her mouth tightened on the string of obscenities she wanted to pour out. “It was a necessity. Not one I agree with if I’m honest, but the risk of discovery was too high otherwise.”
He paused, looking into her eyes and waiting for any response. She said nothing.
“The African Territory government had stolen weapons tech,” he went on, “and a lot of recent terror attacks have been traced to their government funding separatist groups in South East Asia and the former Middle East. That includes the attack on the lunar space port six years ago.”
Her eyes went wider before narrowing in anger. He had her full attention.
“The intelligence package was intentionally misleading, but the expectation was that you would withdraw and kill the op. It was never intentioned that some of your team get killed in the blast.”
“Sixty percent,” she corrected softly. “Sixty percent of my team died in that bomb blast. And I just got hung out to dry for it… or did I?”
“Not really,” he said. “The court martial was a routine matter as would always happen in those circumstances, because some of the reports couldn’t be ignored. The UN needed their scapegoat, especially as we had subcontracted the real target to an external source.”
“Outsourced SpecOps?” she asked with incredulity.
“Something like that,” he admitted. “I don’t have all the information on it, other than rumor that it was a former UNPF of ours. He has the right enhancements to get the infiltration work done.”
Brandt dismissed that as an irrelevance.
“So, you plant the fake intel, send me and my team off on our wild goose chase, publicly demote and blame me when people died, but it was all really an elaborate plan to steal back weapons plans from a supposedly friendly territory who are at least partly behind the terrorist threat?”
“Hard to believe, huh?”
“No,” she said. “Easy to believe, just disgusting. Appalling, actually.” He leaned back, half expecting the swing of a fist that she nearly threw as she continued. “And on top of my people getting killed as collateral, you make me the scapegoat and end my career?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “Until the media interest dies down, you are officially demoted and sent to guard the lunar penal facility.” He spoke more quickly then, and half raised a hand to ward off her anger at the posting, “But actually you’ll be there to on standby to rendezvous with people at our research facility.”
“And what if I don’t keep my mouth shut?” she asked, even if she knew she’d never turn whistle-blower. “What’s to stop me going to the global media?”
“The scientist working in that facility is an old friend of yours,” he told her, “and there’s a realistic threat to his life and those of the rest of his team. We need you, Commander, to keep them safe and escort them to their goal. We don’t have the time to vet and recruit another operative with your skills and motivation.”
“What is their goal, exactly?” she asked.
“Mars,” he said flatly. Brandt leaned back and took a breath. She knew that being angry with him was pointless; he was just a part of that big, shadowy machine that worked behind the scenes.
“Why me?” she asked him.
“Because UNID already knows you can be trusted,” he told her. “Because they gave you the fast-track in the first place and you kept your mouth shut back then.”
Suddenly it dawned on her. The death of Jake Santana and the terrorist he shot a dozen times at point blank range. The terrorist who had the ability to bounce bullets clean off him without armor.
“Also,” he said with a slight smirk, “some UNID lieutenant commander wrote a glowing report about your courage and bravery and requested you be personally assigned to a covert mission.”
The report handed to the admirals in her court martial flashed through her mind, the one she had not been permitted to see and had been wiped immediately afterwards.
“So, who is my new subbie?” she asked, wanting to know who in the secretive UNID thought they knew her so well.
“Lieutenant Commander Torres will meet you at our north-eastern field office at thirteen-hundred tomorrow.”
Torres? Brandt’s face registered shock at the information dump she had just downloaded. Their salads were brought over, and they separated from leaning their heads close to one another, both looking slightly embarrassed and amusing the waiter.
“Something to drink?” he asked.
“We’ll take a bottle of Harlan Cabernet,” she said with a wicked smile. The waiter raised his eyebrows almost to his immaculately styled hairline and spun away theatrically.
“Harlan? What’s that? Red? Californian?”
“It’s two hundred credits a bottle,” she said deadpan. “Bill it to the UNID.”
11
UNID American field office, Worcester, Massachusetts
“Comma—” Brandt stopped herself and amended her new rank. “Lieutenant Commander Brandt here for Lieutenant Commander Torres,” she told the desk clerk, a gray-jacketed woman who would probably have described herself as the first line of defense. She was a bitch, Brandt thought. No two ways about it.
Brandt turned to Nance, the younger officer’s eyes wide with shock. She patted him on the shoulder.
“Good job,” she told him.
“I didn’t…” he stammered.
“I know, but a win is a win. Don’t look too hard at it.” She stepped away from the desk and turned to see the fine features of Commander Morello looking curiously at her. She remembered herself and saluted.
“You’ve been a junior rank to me for less than half a minute,” he said kindly. “You can dispense with the salutes and the Sirs for now.”
Brandt dropped her hand and allowed a small smile to cross her face, despite the devastatingly fatal blow her career had just suffered. “Sir, may I see that report?”
“Sadly, no,” Morello told her with a mischievous smile of his own. “One of the conditions of the report was that it was not to reach open court and has been destroyed now. No mention of it will be in the official records of the hearing.” Brandt looked confused and disappointed. “What I can permit you to do, however,” Morello said, “is join me for dinner later.”
Brandt’s eyes narrowed, assessing the ground for signs of an ambush.
“So…” she began slowly and suspiciously, “you just prosecuted me and demoted me, had me transferred off-world probably forever and now you want to buy me dinner?”
“Hey, I never said I was buying…” he answered with his hands out to his sides.
“Condition of agreement,” she told him, “I pick the place and you pick up the check.”
“Agreed,” he laughed. “Corner of Third and East Forty-Second, right?” He chuckled at her horrified expression. “Relax, I sent the transport to collect you.”
She screwed her mouth up a little as she thought. “Eight-thirty.”
“I’ll pick you up,” he agreed.
“No, meet me there at eight-thirty and we’ll walk.”
Morello agreed before turning back to her, wearing an apologetically awkward look. “One more thing…” He reached out and gently unclipped the shield badge from her uniform, reaching into his pocket and coming out with the three-starred emblem of her newly demoted rank.
“Had that one planned in advance, huh?” she asked him.
10
Lower East Side, NYC
Brandt changed out of her clothes at the headquarters building, cheating the system by requisitioning fresh PT gear from the gym there and bagging her uniform to be cleaned and collected whenever she had need of it again, which she suspected would probably be never. Wearing the gray jogging suit and white sneakers with the UNPF logo on made her feel a little less conspicuous than the crisp, white dress uniform complete with medals.
She was not a native New Yorker, not by a thousand miles, but it was where she based herself whenever she was on extended periods of leave. A couple of times Brandt had travelled to the southwest to visit with Jake or to the Virginia coast with Paterson, but not having any real family home herself—she didn’t get along with her mother—she had chosen the oddly comfortable yet seemingly inhospitable city as the place where her soul belonged.
She walked the route back, crossing the bridge and running her fingertips over the plaque before hitting the street feeling almost a little refreshed. She had gone to her court martial with all the dignity she possessed, expecting to be facing a sanction on a sliding scale somewhere between a dishonorable discharge and life imprisonment. Now it was possible she would spend the rest of her service guarding the shower block on night duty on a base with only five people on and being perpetually stuck in a rank where she would never fully be in command ever again.
But at least, she told herself, she was still in the service.
With the terror threats escalating daily, it was unlikely that she would be based somewhere that was so safe it would be boring, but she knew that high-profile assignments were never going to come her way again. The best she could hope for would likely be a punishment posting.
She put all of that out of her mind as she walked, taking in the sights and sounds and smells of the city. She had seen old movies depicting the place as a noisy, bustling place. There had been areas where everyone walked in fear of being robbed and others where some of the biggest transfers of wealth took place just blocks away.
She experienced none of that now, and only the thrum of repulser and thruster engines stirred the air above the comings and goings of the people at street level. So much of what went on in the cities happened way above ground level but there was something about the street that made her feel… connected. She took her time, wandering back to her hotel and musing about the strange turn of events the day had taken. She checked her watch, calculating the hours she had left before she had to get herself showered and ready to go out. She had time for a nap first.
Who knows? She thought. It might be a late night.
Dressed in a simple black top and matching jeans, Brandt stepped out onto the sidewalk and sucked in a lungful of city air through her nose. It wasn’t warm, but neither was it cold enough to warrant a jacket. Her clothes were simple, functional, but their tight cut gave heavy hints to her physical attributes.
Dead on eight-thirty, Morello rounded the corner of Third to her left. He wore blue denim jeans under a white shirt and sports coat, blending the casual with the formal effortlessly. He wore it as well as he wore his dress uniform. His collared shirt was unbuttoned perhaps one button too many for her liking but his off-duty look emphasized his air of the charismatic Italian descendant.
Brandt took another breath and put on her winning smile.
“Commander,” she greeted him, offering him her hand to shake.
“Anthony, please,” he said as he leaned in to lightly kiss both cheeks in turn. Brandt felt her face flush as he did so, disarming her effectively. She fought down the unexpected urge to reply with “Ayy, Tony” like in classic gangster movies.
“Leslie,” she responded, feeling odd to go by her first name when every day of her life she was addressed either by rank, surname or callsign.
No callsign any more, she thought sourly before shaking it off.
“Leslie,” Morello repeated with a smile. “So, where are we going?”
“Just a little place I know nearby,” she told him. “Come on.”
She set off, jaywalking with impunity across the road in between the sparse traffic of small yellow and black transports. Morello followed, catching up easily within a few strides.
“You from here?” he asked conversationally. Something told her that he already knew she wasn’t, but she humored him with an answer anyway.
“No, I just like it here,” she told him, leaving out the fact that she had been saving to buy her own place there eventually. “You are though.”
“Born and raised. Grew up on Canal with a brother and a sister. Mother was in the service and father was a lawyer.” Brandt frowned internally at that, unsure why she felt the traditional role reversal was an issue. “Went to join straight after high school and got diverted into the UN Attorney’s staff. Did my law degree and been there ever since. Thirteen years now.”
“And there was me expecting some ‘son of the admiral’ story…”
“Hardly, not me anyway,” he laughed cryptically.
They walked in silence for a while, separating to dodge the oncoming pedestrians who threatened to break-up any conversation they struck up. They both moved like native city-dwellers: dodging and overtaking with ease as they gauged the speed of the oncoming human traffic. Brandt stopped by the edge of the sidewalk and smiled back at him before looking at a restaurant across the road. Morello’s face fell. He was looking through the window of a joint that boasted herbal tea and vegan bean burgers.
“I’m messing with you,” she said as she laughed at the obvious disappointment on his face. “I like my vegan bean burgers medium rare and made of prime beef.” She turned and looked behind her at the glass frontage of a dark steak bar before judging a gap in the flow of people and stepping through. Morello followed her inside, his senses instantly assaulted by the heady aromas of sizzled meat and frying garlic butter.
No matter what advances they made in food, from the three expanding pills that formed their twenty-four-hour field rations to the reconstruction of organic material with 3D printers, nothing would ever quite replace the smell and taste of perfectly cooked ribeye.
“Now you’re talkin’,” he said to her as he stepped up beside her.
The floor manager-cum-waiter swept over to them, nodding to Brandt with familiarity, and gestured for her to walk in the direction he dictated. His lips pursed, and his eyebrows rose as he cast an appraising look up and down Morello’s form. They sat in a booth, old red leather and dark wood surrounding them but probably all recently refurbished and carefully aged to look like an early twenty-first century steak joint. All around them were sections of carefully exposed brickwork to give the building an authentic feel, alongside subtle screens built into shallow recesses that cycled old pictures of the steak house in various stages throughout its long history.
“I didn’t know if we were going to see you again this time,” he said to her in a warm but haughty tone. “Thought you’d shipped out again, but instead I see you’ve brought your own prime sirloin with you?”
Morello, despite himself, blushed. Brandt laughed and gave no answer.
“Or is he dessert, honey?”
Brandt laughed again.
“He’s a work colleague,” she explained sternly as she smiled, closing off the conversation before it could devolve and embarrass the commander any more.
He held both hands up in surrender, then offered them both menus in small, leather-bound folders. Brandt didn’t open hers.
“Sirloin, medium rare, sweet potato fries and a salad,” she said.
“Usual for you,” the waiter said. “And you, sweetie?”
Morello cleared his throat in as manly a fashion as he could manage to cover his awkwardness as he scanned down the menu. It was one of those restaurants that was so confident in its expertise that it offered few variations. He chose the most mouthwatering option, trying not to calculate the costs involved.
“Ribeye,” he said as he snapped the old leather-bound menu shut. “Medium, and the same as my friend.”
Forty-nine credits for a steak? Tonight’s gonna cost me a couple hundred at least…
The waiter left with a flourish and a smirk to Brandt.
“You’re a regular then?” he asked her.
“Yeah, I hit this place at least once every time I’m home. I like it here.”
“You don’t get back west much?”
She stopped and watched his face, waiting for him to realize his mistake. His face stayed resolutely unfazed.
“Why west?” she asked carefully. “Why not anywhere else?”
“Because you’re not from here,” Morello told her, “and your accent is—”
“My accent is a mixture and doesn’t sound like the people in the town where I grew up. Didn’t my file tell you that?” she accused him quietly.
“No,” he admitted, “it didn’t.”
“So, are you going to tell me the real reason we’re here?” she pressed, forcing him to look around and lean in closer to speak in a hushed tone.
“UNID,” he said. It wasn’t clear whether he was with the intelligence directorate or just acting on their behalf. “I just wanted to be sure you understood the reasons behind what happened today.”
“I got busted down for screwing the pooch on an op. People died, it was my fault. I’m lucky not to be in jail. That’s what happened.”
“Not quite,” Morello said. “I need your word that what I am about to tell you is treated as classified information. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that acting on this privileged intelligence would be seen as an act of treason against the territory…”
Brandt’s eyes narrowed. She had seen the lawyer in him instantly as he used terminology like he would in a courtroom. The other curiosity was that breaching the confidentiality of the information he was willing to share with her would be seen as treason not to the UN, not to the combined territories, but to the territory. To the Americas. Her interest spiked and she nodded her assent.
“The terror attack on the government building in South Africa was a UNID cover,” he said. Her mouth tightened on the string of obscenities she wanted to pour out. “It was a necessity. Not one I agree with if I’m honest, but the risk of discovery was too high otherwise.”
He paused, looking into her eyes and waiting for any response. She said nothing.
“The African Territory government had stolen weapons tech,” he went on, “and a lot of recent terror attacks have been traced to their government funding separatist groups in South East Asia and the former Middle East. That includes the attack on the lunar space port six years ago.”
Her eyes went wider before narrowing in anger. He had her full attention.
“The intelligence package was intentionally misleading, but the expectation was that you would withdraw and kill the op. It was never intentioned that some of your team get killed in the blast.”
“Sixty percent,” she corrected softly. “Sixty percent of my team died in that bomb blast. And I just got hung out to dry for it… or did I?”
“Not really,” he said. “The court martial was a routine matter as would always happen in those circumstances, because some of the reports couldn’t be ignored. The UN needed their scapegoat, especially as we had subcontracted the real target to an external source.”
“Outsourced SpecOps?” she asked with incredulity.
“Something like that,” he admitted. “I don’t have all the information on it, other than rumor that it was a former UNPF of ours. He has the right enhancements to get the infiltration work done.”
Brandt dismissed that as an irrelevance.
“So, you plant the fake intel, send me and my team off on our wild goose chase, publicly demote and blame me when people died, but it was all really an elaborate plan to steal back weapons plans from a supposedly friendly territory who are at least partly behind the terrorist threat?”
“Hard to believe, huh?”
“No,” she said. “Easy to believe, just disgusting. Appalling, actually.” He leaned back, half expecting the swing of a fist that she nearly threw as she continued. “And on top of my people getting killed as collateral, you make me the scapegoat and end my career?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “Until the media interest dies down, you are officially demoted and sent to guard the lunar penal facility.” He spoke more quickly then, and half raised a hand to ward off her anger at the posting, “But actually you’ll be there to on standby to rendezvous with people at our research facility.”
“And what if I don’t keep my mouth shut?” she asked, even if she knew she’d never turn whistle-blower. “What’s to stop me going to the global media?”
“The scientist working in that facility is an old friend of yours,” he told her, “and there’s a realistic threat to his life and those of the rest of his team. We need you, Commander, to keep them safe and escort them to their goal. We don’t have the time to vet and recruit another operative with your skills and motivation.”
“What is their goal, exactly?” she asked.
“Mars,” he said flatly. Brandt leaned back and took a breath. She knew that being angry with him was pointless; he was just a part of that big, shadowy machine that worked behind the scenes.
“Why me?” she asked him.
“Because UNID already knows you can be trusted,” he told her. “Because they gave you the fast-track in the first place and you kept your mouth shut back then.”
Suddenly it dawned on her. The death of Jake Santana and the terrorist he shot a dozen times at point blank range. The terrorist who had the ability to bounce bullets clean off him without armor.
“Also,” he said with a slight smirk, “some UNID lieutenant commander wrote a glowing report about your courage and bravery and requested you be personally assigned to a covert mission.”
The report handed to the admirals in her court martial flashed through her mind, the one she had not been permitted to see and had been wiped immediately afterwards.
“So, who is my new subbie?” she asked, wanting to know who in the secretive UNID thought they knew her so well.
“Lieutenant Commander Torres will meet you at our north-eastern field office at thirteen-hundred tomorrow.”
Torres? Brandt’s face registered shock at the information dump she had just downloaded. Their salads were brought over, and they separated from leaning their heads close to one another, both looking slightly embarrassed and amusing the waiter.
“Something to drink?” he asked.
“We’ll take a bottle of Harlan Cabernet,” she said with a wicked smile. The waiter raised his eyebrows almost to his immaculately styled hairline and spun away theatrically.
“Harlan? What’s that? Red? Californian?”
“It’s two hundred credits a bottle,” she said deadpan. “Bill it to the UNID.”
11
UNID American field office, Worcester, Massachusetts
“Comma—” Brandt stopped herself and amended her new rank. “Lieutenant Commander Brandt here for Lieutenant Commander Torres,” she told the desk clerk, a gray-jacketed woman who would probably have described herself as the first line of defense. She was a bitch, Brandt thought. No two ways about it.
