The Forbidden Army

  Drelokk and his companion moved quickly through the tenement’s courtyard and into a shadow hallway, pulling out glowsticks and studying the walls.

  “Here, Mokkan, look!” Drelokk hissed and pointed at clean, fresh plaster. “This looks fairly new.”

  Mokkan nodded and brandished the small pick he had tucked into his sash. “This must be it. Now we will see what Grakko sent us after that was so important.”

  Using their tools, they made quick work of the thick but weak plaster, revealing a small chamber at the bottom of a shallow slope. In the light of their glowsticks, an object down in the room glinted silver.

  “What in Ugrand’s name…” Mokkan breathed. As he did, two shadows moved in front of the sphere and a beam of pinkish light erupted from the hole, consuming Mokkan where he stood.

  Drelokk tripped over his feet and tumbled backwards as the pile of melted bones and flesh splattered to the floor of the tenement, dropping his glowstick. The stick rolled to the mouth of the hole, revealing a reptilian leg emerging from the passage just moments before the pink light lit up the hallway once again.

  Chapter Six: Dragonfly

  Los Angeles, Planet Terra, Sol System

  As he combed through the file, the alarm on the panel of Gresham’s HUVR began ringing to indicate that he was nearing his exit. Gresham tossed the documents onto the passenger seat, took manual control of his vehicle and steered off of the A2 superhighway onto the exit for Compton Beach. After winding through the neighborhood for a few minutes looking for his destination, he pulled his HUVR to a halt in front of a shuttered pawn shop and breathed out. Could he possibly have been asked to go to a dodgier neighborhood?

  Prescient of his surroundings, Gresham stepped out of the HUVR, double-checked to make sure it was firmly locked, and listened to the sounds of the night – the crashing waves of the nearby Los Angeles Bay mingling with the loud, boisterous voices of the Compton Beach nightlife. During the day, this seaside mecca was for the tourists and the sunbathers – by night, it turned into a crime-infested nest of sketchy watering holes, drug dens and a variety of extraterrestrials seeking to make a quick credit off of those stupid enough to venture down south of the financial district after sundown.

  “Johnny!” he heard a familiar voice cry from across the street. Gresham looked to the source of the voice and saw a short, overweight, middle-aged Mingiclorian approaching. The industrious little alien ran a hand through the whiskers of hair sprouting from his tomato-red skull between his oversized ears, thinning his bulbous yellow eyes as he squinted at his human friend.

  “Fust, I’m glad you made it,” Gresham said with a sigh of relief. “I didn’t want to come down here by myself and get stood up.”

  “I never stand up a friend,” Fust replied without a hint of accent. While a law-abiding citizen and born and raised on Terra, few aliens in Los Angeles had a finger on the pulse of the underground scene like Fust. Through his HUVR repair shop marched an endless parade of criminals, gangbangers, drug dealers, corrupt politicians, crooked cops, and every other colorful character a city of Los Angeles’ size and prominence could offer up. Gresham had made a point of befriending the Mingiclorian a few years prior after a friend had recommended him as a good source of information on research projects, and had discreetly kept in touch ever since. If there was anyone in Los Angeles who could help him with his new job, it was Fust.

  They shook hands and Fust pointed at a long building about a block away. “My new favorite watering hold on the beach. Called the Dragonfly. Ever been?”

  “I honestly never come down here. Don’t drink too much anymore, either. Bad things happen when I break my rules.”

  “Any good stories?”

  “None that I’d remember. You’d have to ask whoever it was I woke up next to this morning.”

  “Alright, Johnny, now that’s what I’m fucking talking about!” They neared the door to the Dragonfly and they flashed the bouncer their IDs before proceeding inside. “You’re gonna like this place, Johnny, I guarantee it!”

  Unlike many of the bars and clubs in Compton Beach, the Dragonfly was a sparsely populated, low-key establishment with the far side opening out onto a balcony overlooking the bay. The central bar was hunched under a massive cast-iron likeness of the establishment’s namesake and the crowd, while rougher than Gresham may have preferred, seemed indifferent to the new arrivals.

  “Go get us a table outside and I’ll grab some drinks, my treat,” Fust suggested. “What are you having?”

  “Just a beer. I’m still recovering from last night.”

  Gresham found a table out on the veranda and sat down, watching the glint of the sunset against the crashing waves of the bay. Neon lights, gyrating displays and loud music peppered the beach in both directions.

  Fust arrived with a tall mug of lime-and-lemon flavored beer and a fruit-filled liquor of his own and sat down. “Okay, here you are, Johnny. What’s on your mind tonight?”

  Gresham smiled and pulled the files out of his briefcase and laid them on the table. “Nothing too complicated, I just need to pick your brain for thoughts on this.”

  Fust’s eyes twinkled when he saw the MILITARY INTELLIGENCE stamp on the front of one of the cream-colored folders. “Christmas came early this year! Fuck…”

  “Don’t get too excited. Anything worth selling in here was already redacted by SIS. Besides, if there actually was anything of worth in here, I wouldn’t be showing it to you.”

  “Johnny, I’d never!”

  Gresham raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You wouldn’t?”

  “Oh fine, I would,” Fust said with a wide grin after a momentary attempt to keep a straight face. “So what have you got here?”

  “A MID investigator got stabbed looking into a brilliant arms theft. He was going to see a Defense employee who, from what I can discern, was processing the invoice. That employee was murdered, and the MID man – Jeff Vance – is in the hospital now fighting for his life.”

  Fust nodded, clicking his tongue methodically as his big yellow eyes swept across the pictures, the reports, and the other pieces of information contained. He picked up the half of the paper invoice Vance had managed to come away with, tapping one of the serial numbers.

  “So we have sequential serial numbers for a bunch of guns, ammunition boxes…” He glanced at the description of the theft, with black boxes redacting names, dates and various other parts of the story. “Whoever did this has balls the size of fucking horses, Johnny. You don’t just walk up to a Marine Depository and take off with military-grade shit like this.”

  “It has to have been an inside job then, right?”

  “Somebody knew what they were doing,” Fust remarked. “They must have done something similar before.”

  “How did we not catch it last time, then?”

  “Could be any reason. Maybe they went bold this time and actually stole something worth stealing. I mean, look here – this serial code is for a crate of handguns. Say in the past you just swiped a gun or two from the crate. Unless you have a stickler at the base combing over every number on every gun, nobody’s the wiser.” Fust scratched at the lonely, curly hair growing from his chin. “In fact, since most weapons have the serial code imprinted digitally on the little black strip, you’d just have to fiddle with the strip to fool the scanner when it shows up at its intended destination.”

  “Is that difficult?”

  “You’d need the equipment to do it, I guess, but a determined gun dealer would probably have that kind of toy.”

  Gresham looked over the pages. “Any little birds come land on your windowsill with an indication of who’s got that kind of merchandise?”

  “Not lately, no, though I could easily name the usual suspects down in the Zone who would.”

  “Any of them look like this?” Gresham pulled a photograph out of the back of the file and handed it to Fust. The Mingiclorian slurped his drink and tilted his head side to side, trying to distinguish the fuzzy sil
houette in the hallway.

  “Security camera?”

  “Well, yes, at least what SIS let us see after we demanded information. They may as well not have given us anything. All we can make out is that whoever he is, he’s short. Probably no more than five feet tall.” Gresham indicated the figure’s head. “Based on the head shape and these two shadows here sprouting from the top, SIS said he’s probably a Balgoshan.”

  “Well, there are plenty of Balgoshan refugees in the Zone, and some of them are definitely hard-edged criminals, but I’ve never pegged any of those horned bastards to be so bold as to break into the fucking Department of Defense and kill a government employee.” Fust tapped the picture against the table, deep in thought. “Although…”

  “You have someone in mind?”

  “Maybe. There’s this really violent jackass in the north Zone, almost at the edge, who apparently is one of the better smugglers in the area. Plenty of contacts with the Port of Los Angeles, immigration workers, really low-hanging fruit that don’t need much money to keep quiet and happy. His name’s Lugrash.”

  “Lugrash,” Gresham repeated, leaning back in his chair. “I wonder if SIS is looking at him.”

  “Probably not. He keeps a pretty low profile most of the time, flies just low enough under the radar to avoid the SIS’s attention. I’ve only heard of him because I’ve got a friend or two that’s recommended him to – umm, this shit’s all off the record, right?”

  “Last I checked, Military Intelligence has no domestic authority regarding smuggling crimes.”

  “Right, right,” Fust muttered nervously. “So anyways, as I was saying, the reason I’d suspect Lugrash is because he’s got some friends in Santa Monica already. He’d need those friends to know about a weapon’s requisition like this to knock off, or to hijack, or to reroute, or whatever. Not to mention, he’d need friends to break into Defense.”

  “Jesus,” Gresham sighed and rubbed his eyes. “So someone really has to be working from the inside.”

  “Looks to me like you’ve got a rat in your house, Johnny,” Fust said with a shrug. “And there’s only one thing you can do when you’ve got a rat.”

  “Yeah. Call the exterminator.”

  #

  Not twenty minutes later, Gresham turned his HUVR on autopilot and sat back in his seat, staring at other HUVRs zip by on A6, one of the largest automated freeways in Los Angeles. What a day it had been. Waking up next to the beach beauty, his flashbacks, his still-lingering headache – whether it was from the blast or his hangover, he was unsure – and then his unexpected assignment to the field, a line of work he knew absolutely nothing about.

  Other people don’t have lives as interesting as mine, do they? Gresham wondered as he drank from a bottle of water. A soothing male voiced announced that he was nearing the Northridge exit and he set the water aside to reassume control and decelerate from the freeway speeds well in excess of a hundred miles per hour.

  Gresham grabbed his HUVR’s steering module, pulled into the tunnel exit and off the A6. He emerged onto a surprisingly quiet street in the middle of Los Angeles’s Northridge neighborhood. A gargantuan SynthMart stretched along the side of the road, the HUVR lot in front the size of two football fields. Overlooking the road was a massive holoboard announcing: “Northridge enforces a No Extraterrestrials policy within neighborhood limits.”

  Off in the distance, the glowing blue lights of the Northridge Medical Center came into view between a pair of sandy, treeless hills. The three concourses of the enormous hospital, arranged in a triangle shape, loomed over Gresham’s HUVR as he drove into the underground parking bay.

  Gresham rode a lift up from the garage into the lobby, a low-ceilinged room with a dozen different check-in desks. At the Visitor Services desk, a raven-haired woman was yawning and tapping away on a screen with her fingers, probably playing some game.

  “I’d like to see a patient here,” Gresham said as he approached.

  “Name, please?”

  “Major John Gresham,” he replied, showing his ID.

  “Name of patient,” she asked in a bored tone.

  “Lieutenant Jeffrey Vance.”

  She tapped the screen twice and a yellow badge slid out of a device on the desk. “Hold on to that, it’ll give you access to Mr. Vance’s crit-room.”

  “Thanks.”

  A hyperlift ride away was the Critical Wing, a vast maze of small rooms housing patients in severe conditions. Human doctors and automated medical drones darted around the floor between rooms, inspecting patients and keeping track of their vitals.

  A medical drone hovered over to Gresham. “Please state purpose of visit,” a gratingly mechanical voice requested.

  Gresham held his yellow visitor badge up to the drone’s scanner. “I’m here to visit Jeffrey Vance.”

  “Please follow me,” the drone said before leading Gresham through the forest of small pods, each containing a human patient in near-comatose stasis. Arranged around these pods were small, comfortable red couches were friends and families could observe the hospitalized.

  The drone flew away after announcing, “Jeffrey Vance, Patient Alpha 16 T.”

  Vance was a twenty-something, brown-haired man built like a football player with a massive, square jaw. He floated in stasis inside his pod, eyes covered by dark goggles, unresponsive to contact as he struggled to recover from his stab wounds, identifiable by stitches on his bare abdomen and chest.

  A doctor passed. “He’s stable. Are you a friend of Mr. Vance’s?”

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that. We work together.”

  The doctor nodded knowingly. “If you need anything, just let me know. The blue button on the side of his pod will call me.”

  “Thanks.”

  Gresham sat down and stared at his floating friend, narrowing his eyes. He had reviewed the report Vance had been working on to try to figure out where he had left off, but to no avail. The trail seemed cold. Whatever Vance had known that had led him to be attacked, it wasn’t anywhere on file to be found.

  “He’s doing better, at least,” a voice said from one couch over, and Gresham turned to see a young, pretty brunette with large blue eyes watching Vance. She was twirling a pen in her fingers, watching Gresham intently.

  “Yeah, so I hear,” Gresham replied carefully and moved ever so slightly on his couch. “Are you a friend of Jeff’s?”

  “We’re acquaintances. I wanted to come see him, since I hadn’t been over yet since… well, since he wound up in here.”

  Gresham was unsure where to take the conversation from there. “So you and Vance… just acquaintances.”

  She laughed. “Yes, I said that already. Just acquaintances.” The woman studied Gresham for a moment before leaning forward and sticking out her hand. “Lara Taylor.”

  Gresham took it, and she gave him a surprisingly firm grip. “John Gresham.”

  “John Gresham. Alright,” she said and let go of his hand ever so slowly, locking eyes with him. “So are you just acquaintances with Vance too?”

  Gresham shook his head. “No, I’d consider Jeff more of a – well, we work together. Or worked. I’m not sure if he’s coming back to the office anytime soon.”

  “You don’t really look like the typical Military Intelligence officer.”

  “Who said I was an officer?”

  “Nobody. You just don’t look like one.”

  Gresham tried to figure out what Lara Taylor was getting at. Finally he blurted, “What do you do?”

  “What do I do?”

  “Yeah. What kind of work are you in?”

  “Oh… I work with information distribution.”

  Gresham was thrown off by the vague answer. “Information distribution? Well, that sounds… invigorating.”

  “It is. You’d be surprised. I enjoy my work very much.”

  “And what kind of information is it that you distribute?”

  “A diverse selection, usually determined by the customer
. Financial records, political gossip, personal histories… in a town like Los Angeles, different people need different things.”

  Gresham had no idea what the woman was talking about. He blinked, smiled and nodded politely to make it appear he was on the same page. “Sounds like an industry that requires a special talent.”

  “Well, you at least need to make sure the information is good,” Lara Taylor murmured. “Good thing about the President, huh?”

  The sudden change in topic threw Gresham off guard. “Yes, it seems the bomb went off too early. Morbid luck, don’t you think?”

  “Not for the Vegan President. He wasn’t lucky.”

  “Well, no, I suppose he wasn’t.”

  She checked her voxcom’s clock and lifted an eyebrow. “Oh no, is it that late already… If you’ll excuse me, I have to run. Prior engagement. Nice meeting you, Mr. Gresham.”

  “Ms. Taylor,” he replied and shook her hand again. He was a little miffed by being referred to as ‘mister;’ he’d gone by Major for several years.

  After she had left, he turned his attention back to Vance. “What do you know, Jeff? What did you stumble across that we haven’t figured out yet?”

  Not a second later, his voxcom buzzed furiously in his jacket pocket and he withdrew it. On the screen was a simple message from Moss:

  Come to the office IMMEDIATELY. The shit just hit the fan

  Chapter Seven: Urkuran Eve

  Krokandir, Rukkur, Kroka System

  Zurra ducked under a curtain of small, glistening shells collected from the seas of Daruundo as he entered the smoky gukka bar in the 2nd District. Only a few blocks away, preparations were underway for the massive Progressive rally to be staged in the evening following the Emperor’s Urkuran address.

  The smoke of gukka pipes clouded the air in the small bar, and Zurra had to squeeze through the throng of inebriated krokator to reach a staircase that led up to a veranda on the roof. Large, multicolored parasols shaded the seating area, and a bar in the far corner served beastwine to the patrons.