Horizon

Dark Horizon

But even whispering tongues can poison truth.
-Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Imperial Outpost, Alpha Centauri sector
2183
18:55, SET (Standard Earth Time)

     Dressed in a long brown coat with the collar pulled up, Jacen Steele walked down the street. Nodding to a passing couple that gaily walked by, he turned right onto another street and continued his leisurely stroll. Surveying the new cobblestone street—cobblestone, he thought, these guys try hard to make this place look like home—he walked by a large gray building, where the only thing he could hear inside was the humming of machinery.
     “Target acquired,” he whispered into the collar of his coat as he scratched his cheek to mask the two words he’d just uttered, seemingly to no one, since no one was around. Still, in his line of business, he had to be careful. No Intelligence agent had lived to be a ripe old age by being careless, and Jacen Steele wasn’t about to test the theory or push his luck. In a fighter plane, maybe, he admitted to himself, as he took a quick but meaningful glance at the plain building.
      Jacen Steele was a 2nd Lieutenant with the 177th Stealth Squadron—the UNSF’s leading commando/fighter pilot squadron. Not only were they the best when it came to team intelligence hit-and-run missions, but they could hold their own in a fighter plane. It was agreed by most in the squadron, however, that they belonged more on the ground than cooped up inside the cockpit of a Lancer III fighter. It was the younger ones, the Flight Officers (which at this point, the Stealths had an unusual number of at this time), which disagreed with the previous statement. Given a choice between the two, the young hotshots all agreed that they would hop in a fighter at any moment given the chance.
      Steele had come from UNSF Intelligence, recruited specifically by name by Commander Kyle Thompson, to serve with his current teammates. It took him a little while to get adjusted to a team scenario (General Page liked sending Steele out on individual assignments, though he’d worked teams a few times before), but once he fell in the groove, they had accepted him as one of their own. They more or less had to, he thought, leaning against the wall of a nearby restaurant with the gray building still in sight. These people were more or less forced to trust him with their lives, just as he had to trust them with his. Being an Intelligence officer, he’d never really learned to trust anybody—it was the mindset that came with the job. After a few missions, though, he’d learn to relax around his team and even gotten to know a few of them on the personal aspect. It was generally recommended against at Hereford, England—the HQ for UNSF Intel—it was strongly recommended against that you got to know anybody at the personal level. The closer you got to them, the harder it was to let go when something happened to them. If you let feelings get in the way, one of his summer instructors had told him, then the mind could be clouded. The more clouded the mind, the less effective the agent.
      He had as of yet to let any of his feelings get in the way of any of his field assignments—at least not yet, he told himself, still staring at the building. There had been a few times he had been forced (well, not really forced) to bed a few women to get information out of them. As long as he kept telling himself that he was doing it for his government, he could believe it. He tried at all costs to keep the bedding of the women down to a minimum. It was kind of embarrassing having to report it to his commanding officer, which happened to be female (and it was said, one of the best in Intel ever) that he had to bed a woman to get information out of her. Her reply was always one of acceptance, though, with just a little tinge of caution. Caution was a characteristic that Steele thought Major Makeisha Lee didn’t have. He’d heard of some of the things she’d had to do when she went out to the field—most of it was classified, and she wouldn’t have told if it wasn’t—but Steele had no desire to know her techniques. He had his own.
     Turning his mind back to his assignment, he gave a quick assessment of the gray building, the “target” as it had come to be called by the Stealths. Glancing over it for a few seconds, he stopped to light a cigarette. Normally he didn’t smoke, not in the condition he needed his body to be in, but he did occasionally light one up if he thought it would help his cover during an assignment. He thought that a guy leaning against a restaurant smoking a cigarette would look a lot less obvious than just a guy leaning against the wall.   Once again, he turned his attention to his collar.
     “Ordinary plain gray building, just as described,” he continued to his collar. “No windows, only one door that I can see from here. No visible exterior guards. Three stories, looks like.”
     “Good,” came the voice in the earpeice planted in Steele. These new earpeices were getting smaller and smaller, due to the constant changing technology. It made for better cover, and was less obvious than some gigantic thing sticking out of his ear like the ancient Star Trek series. He almost laughed at the thought.
“The traffic?” the voice continued on. “How is that? Heavy, medium, light?”
     Steele checked the traffic. For this time of day, it was decent. For a brief moment, Steele wondered why Commander Thompson would want to know about the traffic, and then the reason hit him. If, for some reason, they had to make a quick escape, they didn’t want some old grandpa holding up traffic while they’re running for their lives. Steele nodded to himself. It made sense. Thompson was competent alright, having been in this business about five years longer than Steele had. Steele had heard rumors that Thompson was friends with both Major Lee and General Page, Director of Operations for UNSF Intel. Not too many people could confess to that; why, Steele didn’t know, and didn’t rightly care. He’d seen Page only two times in his career as an Intel field officer, though Page didn’t mind loading him with assignments. But every organization, be it a government or a drug ring, had a chain of command. Page would send the assignment down to Major Lee, who would in turn hand it over to Steele. Things weren’t quite like the relationship between Commander-in-Chief Wilson and Rear Admiral Beckerd Benson; it was generally known that Benson and Story were face to face quite often when assignments were given. The point in that Steele didn’t see, but it wasn’t his job to question it. Then again, he thought, throwing his cigarette down and stuffing his hands in his pockets, he didn’t work on a starship.
      “Traffic is light at this time of day,” said Steele, glancing over the Imperial groundhoppers that skimmed along about their business. Answering the next question before Commander Thompson had a chance to ask, he said “pedestrian traffic is light as well.” Steele could almost imagine Thompson nodding on his end of the earpeice.
      “What can you tell me about the locks?” Lieutenant David “Starry” Linzan asked, from somewhere else.       The whole squadron was spread about the city, looking at vulnerable points in which to hit the Imperial outposts the hardest. Steele wasn’t quite sure if the Stealths had the equipment to shut down any of this stuff, but they could dress it up in a report and send it to General Page. Page would send it up to Commander-in-Chief Wilson, who would then decided to give the go-ahead or not to do anything about it. If he did decided to do something about it, he would assign the mission either back to Stealth Squadron with the proper materials to proceed with the plan, or he’d have some capital ship like the Stealthlon or the Explorer go and cause some havoc. That’s what it seemed that those capital ships did best.