it was known they were the organization’s best undercover agents. Only a handful of
people in the upper echelons knew their true identities, but everyone in the Service knew
those two agents were to be obeyed. Their investigations were key to the security of the
Empire, and they had to have utmost cooperation at the local levels if they were to be
efficient.
The call came in via an official Service scrambler, so Hein got on the vidicom and spoke
directly. “What can I do for you’?” he asked.
There was no visual image coming from the sender, but that was only to be expected;
these agents would want to keep their identities hidden. “How many people do you have
here on Arcta?” a man’s voice asked.
“There are nine currently available, myself included.” “I’m not talking about `currently
available.’ I mean total, if you pull everyone off current duty for a special assignment.
How many?”
Hein barely hesitated. “Fourteen, but some of them are on pretty important missions . . .”
“That might just be enough. Periwinkle and I have pretty important missions, too. We’ll
need everyone you’ve got. We’ve got a gang of traitors trapped in their hideout, but we’ll
need help prying them out.” He gave the location and continued, “Can you get all your
people there within three hours?”
“If you want them, you’ve got them.” Pulling some of his people out of their present
assignments was a big sacrifice and months of work would be lost-but assisting Wombat
and Periwinkle always took top priority. By helping them he could hope to win some good
words in the official report of their mission.
Without further word of explanation, Agent Wombat cut the circuit. Colonel Hein didn’t
consider it rude; agents in the field didn’t always have time for the niceties. Within a few
minutes he was arranging calls to all his own agents, giving them the rendezvous
coordinates. Once that was done, he had to arrange for weapons and transportation.
Wombat hadn’t told him how large a mob he’d be facing, so he picked armament with
maximum firepower and versatility.
The last thing he did before leaving his office was to enter a record of the call in his
official daily report. This sounded like a dangerous job; if he didn’t come back, there had
to be some record so Headquarters on Tellus would know what had been going on.
Arcta was a cold world, circling its red dwarf star near the outer limits of the zone of
habitability. Its north polar ice cap was a barren stretch of glacial ridges and valleys,
almost totally uninhabited. Here, in the midst of a howling gale, was the spot where
Wombat had asked to rendezvous on the top of a bluff overlooking a narrow valley
carved out by a river that was currently frozen. By the side of the frozen river was a
two-story prefab building, presumably the hideout Wombat had mentioned.
Hein and his agents were gathered on the bluff within the time allotted. It hadn’t been
easy, and some of the agents had been forced to come here ill-prepared for the freezing
weather. Most of them sat in their copters with the heaters on, awaiting further
instructions. Hein looked around for some sign of the two agents who’d summoned them
all here.
A copter appeared hovering overhead and the vidicom in Hein’s vehicle came to life.
“Have you got them all?” the voice of Wombat asked.
“All present and accounted for,” Hein said proudly. “Good. The gang we’re after is holed
up in there, as you may have guessed. There are somewhere between fifteen and
twenty of them-a bit too many for us to tackle ourselves. We want your people to go in
and get them.
Take as many alive as possible-we hope to get some good information out of them.”
“What about you?” Hein asked.
“Periwinkle and I have decided it’s best not to show our faces just yet. We’ll hover up
here and keep the area covered in case any of them escape and get past you.”
“Smooth,” the colonel nodded. He looked over the valley with a practiced eye and then
gave the deployment order to his shivering troops. Within minutes, the team from SOTE
had moved out and down the sides of the bluff in an attack on the criminal headquarters.
Going down the face of the bluff was the most dangerous part of the assault, for the
agents were easy targets against the cliff. They drew no enemy fire, however, and Hein
prayed his luck would continue. Maybe the enemy had no long-range weapons, or maybe
they just wanted to save themselves for the closer battle. In any case, he knew his
agents were trained and ready to cope.
When the entire assault team was down on the valley floor, they started moving across
the white, lightly packed snow toward the building. They crept in, bending low and taking
advantage of any natural cover this sparse landscape presented. Still there was no
enemy fire. That could be a good or a bad sign, and Hein was becoming nervous. As a
good commander, he had to assume the worst.
“Are you sure they’re in there?” he asked over his portable comlink to the copter hovering
above.
“They’re there, all right,” Wombat said. “They’re trying to lull you into a false sense of
security. Don’t be fooled.” Slowly Hein and his team closed in on the quiet building,
blasters at the ready to return enemy fire that never came. At last they were right up
against the walls, stationed on either side of the doors and windows of the first floor. At
a silent signal from Hein, they burst through the openings, steeled to meet tough
resistance.
The ground floor of the building was deserted. Perplexed, Hein pointed for some of his
agents to go upstairs while he returned to the comlink. “The place seems empty,” he
reported.
“Are all your people in there? Have they checked everywhere?”
“That’s what they’re doing right now.”
A single blaster beam from the waiting copter lashed downward, striking a bundle of
explosives planted on the roof.
With a ground-shattering roar that touched off avalanches seven kilometers away, the
building exploded in a blinding flash of light. Dust and debris were thrown high into the air,
only to fall again like a blanket of new snow upon the ruins of what had once been a
building.
The copter circled for several minutes over this scene of desolation, checking to make
sure there was not the slightest sign of life in the wreckage. Once convinced, the craft
and its passengers flew off, content with their day’s work.
Chapter 2
Deadly Doubles
The small spaceship approached the asteroid belt at great speed. The space debris
ahead was not so densely packed that it was an impassable hazard, but it did serve as a
natural obstacle course to be successfully astrogated. A wrong move could be fatal. It
would take fast reflexes and steady nerves to make it through without mishap.
In the co-pilot’s seat, Jules d’Alembert asked, “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
The pilot, his brother-in-law, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “If I don’t do it now,
I never will,” Pias Bavol said. “I’ve gone through here at cruising speed, but I’ll have to do
better than that. Lady A won’t let me cruise along casually if she gets me in her sights.”
“Eh, bien,” Jules said. “The show’s all yours.”
Pias stretched his fingers and swivelled his shoulders a few times to limber them up, then
leaned forward to concentrate on the control screen. The panel extended before him, a
broad expanse covered with buttons, knobs, switches, screens, dials, gauges, and
glowing lights. Pias extended the protective screens to their limits to shield the ship from
a stream of particles too small to be detected on the sensors. He cut off the rear
scanners and focused all the vessel’s detection capacity to a rapid forward scan. He
wasn’t worried about asteroids overtaking him from the rear-but the defensive shields
would be useless against a flying piece of rock more than a couple of meters in
diameter.
After one last millisecond of hesitation, he turned off the automatic pilot and took
complete manual control of the spacecraft. The autopilot would have been useful for
dodging one rock at a time, at slow speeds, but it tended to overcompensate; in
swerving to avoid one oncoming asteroid it could very well steer them directly into
another and not be able to correct in time. Fine tuning like that was still the province of
human reflexes.
Reflexes were one of Pias’s greatest assets. Both he and Jules were natives of planets
whose gravity was three times stronger than that of Earth. Over the generations, nature
had bred their ancestors for lightning reactions. Pias, Jules, and all their kin could move
at speeds that dazzled people from normal gravity worlds.