The Last Watchmen Read online

  “The MEA military ship, Basilisk, is moving to firing position on the Shivan Interdictor!” Matty stated.

  “Estimated time?” inquired Dekker.

  “Less than sixty seconds to intercept. It’ll depend on the red tape. They’ll need clearance to fire this close to the planet.”

  The Shivan interceptors immediately broke off. They fired on their own crippled vessels that couldn’t make the climb, and scuttled any possible evidence as to their origins. Loose ends secured, they rocketed back into orbit and into the holds of their mothership. Seconds later, the Shivan Interdictor winked out of real-space, disappearing just moments before Basilisk reached firing range.

  Vesuvius pried her own white-knuckled grip from the arms of her chair. She forced herself to relax and breathe slowly, clearing her head of the adrenaline that muddied her thoughts.

  “Someone hired pros,” she commented.

  Dekker nodded. “It’s not cheap to pay for a Shivan strike team—they could’ve hired us for that much. Someone with a lot to lose must want Austicon silenced.”

  ***

  Just after the distinct clunking sound of the ship touching down on tarmac, the door to the cargo hold slid open. Prognon Austicon smiled smugly.

  “That sure was a lot of turbulence, Dekker.”

  Dekker glared at the prisoner; he led his team and the MEA’s constables into the hold. “It was nothing. Just wanted you to enjoy your last ride.”

  Vesuvius confronted Austicon. It would be her last chance before the MEA took him back into custody. “So, are you going to tell me?”

  “I’m sorry?” He feigned ignorance.

  “Your tattoo. What does it mean?”

  The criminal made a tsk-tsk noise. “My dear, I am a man of my word. Search the galaxy, rim to rim, and you’ll find that I have never lied. Of course, that does not make me any less dishonest.” He grinned through his double-talk. “If you’d upheld your end of the bargain, I certainly would have told you.”

  “Bargain?” asked Dekker.

  “It was nothing,” she spat. “Just a condemned man trying to make a deal.”

  The criminal chuckled under his breath. “You will have to decide for yourself what you believe, little Vivian. I could have escaped at any time; I just waited for you to decide.”

  She snapped a quick photo of Austicon’s tattoo. “Sure. Whatever.” Her words dripped with disbelief.

  “Believe what you will,” he called over his shoulders as the MEA’s constables began wheeling him away. “It’s only because you were such gracious hosts that I deigned not to part company until now.”

  Dekker shook his head at the ranting.

  “Remember what I said, Miss Briggs,” his yell echoed in the hall. “I have not lied to you.”

  Vesuvius drew her thoughts inward. She pulled aside her Katana and read the inscription again. Sword made by Muramasa, a gift for Harry Briggs, Godfather to my Son.

  Between Austicon’s veiled comments and the funeral for Shin, a pall hung over the mood. Dekker put an arm around Vesuvius.

  “Come on, Vees. Let’s get out of here; I’ll take you someplace nice for dinner.” He led her out of the cargo hold. “I know a place nearby.”

  ***

  Vesuvius threw back the shot of rice liquor and squinted through the dingy, smoke-filled air. Dekker sat across from her, sipping from a glass of water; he didn’t often drink intoxicants.

  She smirked to herself, she should have guessed. This grungy dive had been Dekker’s idea of a “nice restaurant.” The food was good, though.

  The two reminisced, remembering their good friend, Shin. The family scheduled a wake for two days hence. In the morning, Dekker and Vesuvius would stay with Master Muramasa until after the funeral; following a payday, the rest of the Investigators could take a vacation until then.

  In the middle of Dekker’s retelling of an old story involving him and Shin, something caught Vesuvius’ eye. A news brief broke into the sports program on the nearby vidfeed. She pointed to it and Dekker turned to watch.

  Footage from the nearby landscape showed the lifeless bodies of MEA constables, the same men the Dozen had turned the criminal over to only hours prior. Captured by a nearby security camera, several lithe, black-clad assassins surprised the escort, cutting them to pieces with planned precision. The masked murderers reverently escorted Prognon Austicon beyond the carnage. The criminal smiled at the camera and held up a hollow media tube, the kind used for sending written messages. Playing to the camera, he made a show of tying an elegant silk cord around it before dropping the tube into a puddle of human blood as he departed.

  Vesuvius’ hand shot to her hip, looking for her katana. She’d left it in her hotel room; restaurants mandatorily enforced the MEA weapon bans on their premises. Nonetheless, she knew that the message had been tied with the sageo ripped from her father’s sword.

  At some point during transport, Prognon Austicon had been free: he’d snatched the sash from the cargo hold’s floor, and now he taunted her. The newscast made no mention of the communication cylinder.

  She could only imagine what the message tube contained.

  Dekker’s Dozen #003

  Catch Me If You Can

  “Just don’t screw this up, Guy.”

  Guy shrugged, “Who, me?” He and Dekker walked into the waiting transport skiff.

  Dekker shot him a look.

  “I’m telling you, that wasn’t my fault.”

  “What wasn’t your fault?”

  “Whichever thing you’re thinking about,” Guy defended weakly.

  Dekker crawled past Vesuvius and into the pilot’s seat; Guy followed as far as the control cabin. Dekker wasn’t exactly in a jovial mood.

  Guy glanced at Vesuvius. She’d brooded quietly, moodily, for the last couple days. All morning she’d thoughtfully fingered that metal cylinder the MEA constabulary forces had given them. Her dark mood scared Guy to sobriety; he didn’t want to get stabbed.

  “I hear ya, Dekker. I’ll drop you and Vees down at the Miyajima temple and finish the transport.”

  “Good. You should have just enough time to complete the job and get back to receive us. This one’s all on you. Nothing should blow up.”

  Guy grimaced. “I dunno. Didn’t you read this guy’s file?”

  “I read every file.”

  “Yeah, but the guy doesn’t exist. No record, vanilla info—except that the powers that be want him ferried to a site that doesn’t technically exist. They’re sticking him in some deep dark hole; it’s some kind of black ops, under the table thing. What little is left in the MEA intelligence community wants this guy gone.”

  “You’re paranoid.”

  “Am I, Vees?”

  “Not this time,” Dekker said flatly. “I read every file. Both the text and between the lines.”

  “So you don’t think I’m crazy this time?”

  “Just do the job properly. You bid this one. It’s your job; just don’t let it reflect poorly on the Dozen. And don’t blow up my skiff.”

  ***

  Dekker ran the preflight diagnostics on the transport vehicle. He looked up at the flashing alert and checked the data exchange before activating the door release.

  A loud groan filled the inside of the loading bay. Two sections of wall tilted on their hydraulic axis, granting access to the team waiting outside.

  Vesuvius, usually groomed meticulously, hadn’t straightened her hair in days. She brushed a curly lock from her face and peered out the window and watched.

  Guy jogged over to the delivery officers. The men, dressed like MEA constables. They wore real side-arms and body armor—not a common situation. Guy signed the transfer documents and directed while Corgan and Rock escorted their new “friend” to the holding bay of the Dozen’s skiff.

  “Since when do these guys carry pistols? I’ve seen a few carry worthless ‘beamers,’ but those guys are packing real heat,” Vesuvius observed.

  Dekker peered over
the console and agreed. “I gather this prisoner is… of special interest.”

  ***

  A plume of water shot skyward behind the skiff as it raced above the ocean’s surface, speeding north from Reef City. Inside, Dekker shifted out of the pilot’s seat and let Corgan slide in to take the stick. Dekker took Vesuvius’ hand.

  “Come here. I’ve got something you should look at.”

  Viv looked up, quizzical. Curiosity replaced her gloom and she followed him to the passenger cabin.

  Plugging a memory module into a vid device, Dekker explained, “I paid good money for this.” He nodded to the tube she held. Still unopened, she wound the silk cord through her fingers like a child doing a cat’s-cradle. “Are you too afraid to open it?”

  She shot him a sharp, defensive look. Then, her face relaxed and she shrugged, not quite ready to admit that Dekker might be right.

  Dekker queued the video and set it to run. “This is the feed from inside the MEA intelligence bureau. I don’t know what they discovered yet, but let’s find out.” He stood and closed the cabin doors for privacy. Nobody but Dekker had ever seen Viv rattled, and nothing got her riled up like her family issues.

  Vesuvius’s grip tightened on the cylinder as the video played. A four-way feed from different data sources followed the forensics team as they examined the metal tube. One of the feeds interviewed the only surviving guard, but it was muted and the captions redacted. The researchers paid little attention to the sageo or the container as they focused on what it held: a single piece of paper. Heavy handed script had penned five simple words. “Catch me if you can.”

  With her curiosity piqued by the video, Vesuvius unscrewed the lid and slid the paper out. Unrolling it, she held it against the screen and compared. The MEA had cut the bottom off the sheet. The video showed the original; a hand drawn tree at the footer with nine red leaves. Austicon had improvised his artwork using fresh, bloody thumbprints for the leaves.

  Vesuvius sighed and regained her composure.

  “Hey, we’ll get him,” Dekker said, and tapped the interview screen, blowing it up.

  The guard lay in a hospital gurney, hooked up to tubes and machines as he gave his interview—this part didn’t receive the same censoring. “They came out of nowhere,” he rasped. A coughing fit seized him and a Krenzin doctor bent over the patient and adjusted an IV feed. “They were fast. Black and fast—fast like they could read our minds, they were that fast. They looked humanoid, but there was something about them. They seemed more like…” The video scrambled for a second and resumed. “…then I saw him, Austicon. He scribbled the note. I think. I don’t know; I could have imagined it. I just remember holding my guts and breathing smoke.” He coughed again and the video stopped and offered a timestamp and a warning against dissemination.

  Dekker backed up the video. When the Krenzin leaned over the gurney, he noted the doctor’s badge information and scribbled it on the back of his hand.

  “That’s it?” Vesuvius asked. “I thought this was good intel?”

  Dekker placed a call from his handset and paused to answer her. “It is. The MEA is hiding information from its own internal services. We’ll see if the doctor can fill in the blanks for us.” He held up a finger for silence as the call connected. “Hello,” Dekker greeted the hospital receptionist and offered a fake name with false Intelligence credentials. “Is Doctor Botnik available?” He frowned as the answer came, and then he severed the line.

  “Well?”

  “They told me they have no record of him ever working there.”

  Vesuvius scowled, about to launch into an expletive laced rant about the Mother Earth Aggregate. A chime emitted from the door and Guy entered.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting,” Guy said. He rummaged through the storage bins and pulled out a med kit.

  “Expecting to get stabbed?” Dekker asked.

  “No,” Guy sighed. “I don’t have that much luck with the ladies.”

  “You’re about to,” Vesuvius growled.

  “I just need a grade-three stimulant for the prisoner,” Guy stated, loading a medical jet injector gun. “The MEA doped him so he’d sleep straight through the transfer. Guess they don’t want him talking.”

  “Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” Dekker asked. It was more of a statement than a question.

  “You said it. This one is my job,” Guy said.

  “Some things are better left unknown,” Dekker cautioned.

  “Yeah, but knowing details might help me prepare in the event of any foul play like we ran into with Austicon. This prisoner’s got almost as much redacted material in his file as Austicon did, except that we know nothing about him. At least you had enough info on Austicon that we were prepared.”

  Dekker replied with a skeptical look.

  “I just don’t want to get caught with my pants down,” Guy explained.

  “As long as you’re not trying to expose some vast criminal conspiracy, which you can’t do anything about anyway. Some information is too dangerous to steal from MEA Intelligence.”

  Guy pointed at the video monitor. It displayed the emblem denoting the high classification level. “I’ll take that under advisement,” he quipped as he made for the door.

  Dekker sighed. “Touché.”

  ***

  Corgan aimed the VTOL jets on the skiff’s underbelly and set the vehicle down for a gentle landing on the reserved skid outside the Miyajima temple. The loading ramp descended and Dekker and Vesuvius departed. Robe fluttering in the engine’s wake, Master Muramasa waited for them at the skid’s edge.

  Amid the boots clomping down the steel grid-work of the ramp, Guy could hear Dekker call back. “Remember! No explosions!”

  Guy grinned and slapped the button to retract the entry ramp. He fingered the intercom. “We’re making good time, boys. How’s our cargo?”

  “Chatty,” Rock replied through the speaker.

  “Perfect. I’m on my way. Corgan, take your sweet time getting us to the rendezvous point.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Guy sauntered to the holding area while Corgan went to the cockpit and lifted off. Guy found the prisoner strapped down. “Morning, sunshine.” He pulled up a chair. “Let’s talk about you.”

  The dark skinned prisoner laughed. The combination of drugs in his system made him giddy, almost drunk. “Gladly, Mister Guy.”

  “How did you know my name?” Guy asked, surprised. He looked to Rock.

  Rock shook his head negative. He hadn’t shared any information with the prisoner.

  “I’ve read the dossiers on all of the Dozen. I had to make sure I knew and trusted who might be transporting me to my secure location. I’m Lynch.”

  “Wait, what? Location, you mean prison?”

  “No.” He chuckled. “I’m an intelligence asset. I’ve been undercover with the Druze for over a decade. I can barely even remember a time before my insertion.”

  “Druze? The Babylonian underground?”

  “Yes. They might seem like a group of religious holdouts, like the Jerusalemites, but there is much more to the Druze than that. They control a criminal organization with its hands in a lot of different cookie jars.

  “The Druze are both more, and less than, simple religious holdouts. Centuries ago, they reorganized under some new leader; they called him the Anagoge. They’ve been waging a secret war on their enemies for generations, which is ironic since they’ve all but forgotten their roots.”

  “Wow, this interrogation stuff is easier than I thought,” Guy quipped. “For a trained operative, you seem awfully free with sensitive information.”

  “After what I stumbled into, I’d hoped for a qualified team to do transport. I’ve had little opportunity to communicate with my superiors. The only signal I could send was for my extraction; I can’t trust even my MEA contacts until I get to a safe-house.”

  Guy grinned. “I knew there was more to this than just a prisoner transport.”

&nb
sp; “I’m just glad to have the protection of thirteen trained mercenaries and a vessel packing some serious firepower. Once the Druze realized I’d intercepted their intel, found the link between the Dodonic Cult, Druze, and the Verdant Seven, I had to get out, and fast. Every lowlife in the system is going to be gunning for me, looking for a bounty. I’m naked with a big target on me.”

  Guy and Rock traded worried glances.

  “What?”

  “You know the government. Always jumping at the lowest bidder.”

  Lynch obviously didn’t understand.

  “They bid the transport out publicly as a prisoner transport. We happened to be the lowest bid—just us three. The rest of the Dozen are on leave. There’re just three of us, jobbing on the side for some extra cash.”

  Lynch’s worried look didn’t go unnoticed.

  “Oh, don’t worry. It gets worse. We’re in a class 4 skiff; there’re no weapons systems on this vessel. Had to cut corners somewhere,” Guy laughed nervously.

  Rock shifted nervously towards the door. “Maybe I’ll go tell Corgan to take us by the fastest route?”

  Guy nodded, and then turned to Lynch. “So maybe you should tell me more about these groups. The Dodonic Cult and the Verdant Seven?” His look of confusion was authentic—he’d never heard of them, even from conspiracy theorists.

  Lynch no more than opened his mouth when the warning sirens began blaring. The floor bucked and shook and the entire cabin shuddered with impact.

  ***

  The gathering at the wake was large. Crowds clustered into smaller social groups, congregated all over the area. Everyone who ever met Shin loved him. The funeral, scheduled for the following day, would be much smaller; work colleagues and his broad circle of acquaintances made up most of the big crowd that came this night to celebrate his life. Muramasa invited only a handful of people to the intimate funeral on the following day. The family line had shrunk these past few generations, ending now with Shin’s untimely death.