By Other Means (18 page)

Being a Martyr was fine, if that was what fate had in store for you, Sorilla just didn’t think that you should rush fate’s playbook.

She watched as the security forces were mowed down in the initial strike, noting that they had access to heavy weapons generally not in line with what she’d issue for use inside a tin can bubble in space. The human security teams were more effective, tipped off and guided by her overwatch of the situation, but Sorilla realized in less than the first minute that they were going to lose the fight.

She logged an order into the system and sent it out, resulting in the security teams falling back on her command to protect the SOLCOM delegates. As she surmised, once they shifted to a defensive stance, the attackers largely ignored them.

Sorilla only then started to move, standing up and walking calmly amid the furor toward where the Ambassadors were sitting, both human and alien obviously in shock from the fight.

She stopped in front of their table just as the fighting largely ended with the victorious attackers securing the last of the Alliance security and turning their focus to the remaining humans and the stunned diplomatic team.

“Check fire.” Sorilla ordered aloud, “Hold your positions.”

“This isn’t your command, Major,” Swift growled, shifting his grip as he shielded the human contingent, standing in line with his men. “Not your call.”

“Do as she says,” Ruger growled, eyes on the situation and clearly not liking what he was seeing.

“Not your call either, Admiral, I’m not under military jurisdiction,” Swift growled.

Sorilla shot him a glare, but didn’t say anything. Instead she shot out a mission priority order across the implant network they all shared. In effect, claiming that the situation fell under her orders and not Swift’s. She could see Swift instantly stiffen and twist to snap at her, which was mildly disappointing. Not that he objected, that was expected, but any Operator would have done so on the network and not in public space.

“Swift.” Ruger’s voice was low and gravelly, but it brooked no objections or complaints from the other man as he cut in.

On the network his codes backed Sorilla’s, rendering the argument moot unless the Ambassador chose to step in. A few long moments passed, but no other network codes chose to intervene.

Swift hesitated, but finally took a step back and nodded to his team. “Check fire. Don’t do anything to start a fight unless they go after our principle.”

The men nodded, clearly frustrated and relieved. They knew their task, and they weren’t happy about stopping the fight, especially since two of their number lay dead on the floor, but it was clear they were on the wrong end of the numbers game. They fell back a couple steps, but none of the dropped their weapons as the attackers approached.

“Lower your weapons,” The one Sorilla assumed that the leader ordered.

She crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head, “Not going to happen.”

“Lower them now!”

Shit. This Diplomacy bullshit is not my deal,
Sorilla mentally griped, though honestly this wasn’t the first time she’d been in very similar circumstances.

“Look, you’ve got guns, we’ve got guns, if you want a shootout we can do that,” She said as calmly as possible, “but if you want our weapons, you can come over here and take them.”

“You are not giving orders here!”

Sorilla remained where she was, standing between the human ambassador and the Alliance one, “Neither are you just yet. You showed some balls walking in here like this, but you have to know that there’s no exit strategy for you, so what’s your play?”

“Balls? Play? This is no sport, Terran. You do not have to die here today, we are after the collaborators.”

Sorilla’s eyes widened.

Collaborators.

That was a powerful word, on Earth at least. It wasn’t something that should be tossed around casually, and she wondered if it were well matched to the situation. So far she’d seen no hint of any of the kinds of things that she would normally associate with the sort of government occupation that would engender that word to the lips of the resistance, but she knew that everything she had was filtered and sanitized… more than likely, at least.

“A resistance then,” She said aloud, now fishing for information. “I’m surprised, what we’ve been able to learn so far didn’t indicate anything like that existed in the Alliance.”

That was a semi-blatant lie, she’d already picked up enough to know that some worlds certainly chafed under the control of the Alliance government, but at the same time she was looking at examples of what she had believed previously to be the staunchest species in the alien cluster.

The leader, a member of the same race she’d pegged as the local spy master, sneered… or at least Sorilla supposed it was a sneer… her way.

“The Alliance has fed you propaganda. There are billions waiting to throw off their shackles and rise up, afraid only of the converging terror of the Ross and the Sturm!”

Sorilla ignored the words, focusing on the body language. Interpreting body language was an art form, one she’d mastered a long time ago, but on aliens it was like learning to walk all over again.  She had limited data on how they reacted, what their base instincts were, and that was a problem. A predatory species would have massively different reactions than a herd species, for example, and that was ignoring the simple issue of body formation.

Not all of the Alliance were humanoid, which made things harder again. Many were, however, and as best she could tell the Alliance was ruled by a humanoid culture, so she supposed she had that in her favor.

For all that, however, Sorilla twitched as the leader… terrorist, freedom fighter? She didn’t know, didn’t care… talked. He was bluffing, she was almost certain. There were some discontented groups in the Alliance, clearly, but she didn’t read his threat of billions as being remotely true. This wasn’t the act of a strong group, for one thing.

If they had been that strong, they would have approached the human delegation and tried to open negotiations. Terror strikes, like this, were the acts of desperate people. People who felt they didn’t have the strength to face their enemies on any legitimate battlefield, and were forced to use whatever means were available.

So, he doesn’t have billions backing him…
Sorilla noted, nodding slowly as she came to that conclusion.
Good. That means we can use them, and they need us more than we need them.

“Liar!”

Sorilla blinked, surprised by the new voice, and looked askance at the Alliance ambassador.

Apparently no one told him the best way to get a bullet in the head was to open his mouth and ask for it,
She thought dryly as the focus of the whole event shifted back to what appeared to be the main target.

“You and your insane band of imbeciles are nothing but fringe fools,” the Ambassador blustered, apparently unaware of the number of angry people aiming powerful weapons in his direction. “You accomplish nothing but the destruction of public property and merely drive yourself farther from the people you claim to be protecting!”

“Is that so?” The leader sneered, or at least Sorilla registered the expression as a sneer and coded her implants appropriately. “At least we claim to protect the people, you merely fall all over the Sturm, or quiver in fear from the Ros!”

“The Sturm are our allies!”

“They don’t care for you or anyone else, and you know that as well as I!”

Sorilla watched, finding it more than a little surreal, as the terrorist attack on a diplomatic meeting turned into a shouting match. She supposed that she’d seen odder in her years of service, but she couldn’t think of when at the moment. Still, as long as they were content to scream at each other instead of shoot one another, she was content to watch, listen, and pick up what intel they were willing to dole out.

Unless this was an intentional setup, which she had a hard time believing it could be, what she was hearing now was more honest than everything she’d been told since arriving.

*****

Sienele was swearing as he watched events unfold over the monitors, realizing that he now had two entire diplomatic parties being held by one of the fringe rebel groups that still plagued many of the worlds that had joined the Alliance.

He couldn’t figure out just which group this was, however as it obviously included members from several different species that would narrow the field down. Most of the rebel groups were severe isolationists and didn’t trust other species, many of them were core fundamentalists with belief systems that didn’t even include other intelligent life. For a group to have brought in other species meant that it was far more progressive in nature than normal, and probably had ulterior motives beyond the obvious.

“How long before you can have a full team in place?” He asked over his shoulder, to where the Lucian Sentinel was speaking quietly, yet urgently, into a comm.

Kriss glanced over, “Soon.”

The word was hardly soothing, but it would have to do, Sienel supposed.

“We cannot let the diplomats die, Kriss.” He ordered, “The Alliance is ill prepared for a war.”

Kriss paused, “Are you ordering me to save the Terrans first?”

Sienele hesitated, then nodded tersely, “Yes.”

The Sentinel stared back for a long moment, before finally saluting stiffly, his fist crooked out slightly. “On your orders.”

Sienele sighed after the Sentinel had left, knowing that order had cost him a great deal of respect. Lucians were very understanding about sacrifices if it helped them defeat the enemy, but to sacrifice in order to
save
the enemy? No, that wasn’t something the Sentinel would forgive anytime soon.

Unfortunately Sienele was well aware of just how precarious the situation was, and he doubted very much that the Sentinel had any clue.

Oh, the Alliance certainly had the power to simply fly right over the Terrans and pound their world’s into submission. From what he’d seen it was a small miracle that the tasked fleet hadn’t already done just that. Certainly, that particular miracle was part of what was holding their hand in check, but every piece of intelligence they had said that the Terran’s just didn’t have the power to hold off the Alliance in force.

The trouble was, the Alliance wasn’t
in
force.

Most of the Sturm Navy was spread all over the Galaxy, either holding the Ross in check or actively dealing with other empires around Allied borders. Along with them were the majority of the Alliance navies in support of the Sturm, to varying degrees.

The only group that had the forces necessary were, perhaps, the Ross… and Sienele would personally throw himself out of the station and into the heart of a dying sun before he offered
them
a free pass to act in this sector now that he’d seen just how deep their interest went.

He had to learn
why
the Ross were so intent on a seemingly insignificant border world before he would even consider offering up that kind of authorization, and even then he couldn’t’ imagine a scenario in which it would be a
good
idea to let the Ross act unilaterally.

No, Sentinel Kriss would have to understand, and if it became too much of a problem… well, Sienele would find some unimportant border dispute to assign him to.

*****

Ruger watched impassively as the shouting continued to escalate, he was actually shocked it hadn’t devolved to violence already given that fully half the people arguing were armed and had very little to lose over a little more death. That said, the information they were spewing was worth its weight in platinum, and he had to admire how Major Aida was subtly de-escalating the conflict whenever it appeared ready to boil over.

You’d almost think she was used to standing between armed factions and treating them like loudmouthed teenagers.

Of course, Ruger was well aware that was
precisely
what many of her missioned entailed. When you were trying to stitch together a reasonable resistance force out of a half dozen different religious sects or even a couple completely different beliefs, juggling full grown men like they were cranky toddlers was par for the course.

Still, I doubt she’ll be able to keep it going much longer as it stands,
He decided. The rebels, if that was what they were, had to know that security was on its way. In fact, the longer they seemed content to ignore than, they more nervous he personally felt. Only people who didn’t expect to get out alive wouldn’t care about security at this point, and he
really
didn’t want to be trapped in a room with a bunch of potential suicide bombers or whatever the local equivalent was.

Ruger sent an order through the implant network, telling the Major to cut her interrogation short. He didn’t want to see what would happen if they pushed their luck too far here.

Hell, maybe we’ve already done just that.

*****

Sorilla blinked, acknowledging the order from the Admiral and began to put her escape plan into action.

The Admiral probably expects me to deescalate this mess,
 She thought, amused,
won’t he be surprised.

“So who are you here to kill?” She stopped deftly deflecting the attentions of the terrorist leader and opted to bluntly smash him right between the eyes with her next question instead. Of course, she already knew the answer to that one. “Since you said we didn’t have to die, I have to assume you’re going to kill the Alliance diplomatic team and lay it at our feet?”

The leader actually looked a little chagrined, maybe even a little apologetic, but confirmed her words with his own.

“Yes. I am sorry, but your people have provided us with an opportunity we’ve been waiting for for a long time.” He told her, hefting his weapon and aiming it at the Ambassador.

“Well, if we’re going to catch the blame anyway,” Sorilla shrugged and casually slid her own weapon from her holster, drawing the immediate attention of no less than five of the gravity pulse weapons.

She ignored them, flipping the MTac over in her hand and offering it to the Terrorist, “Why don’t you kill him with one of our weapons.”