Horizon2

    Before Steele could respond to Starry’s request, he heard another voice in his earpeice, the voice of Captain Julie Taylor: “I got it,” she said. Taylor was the squadron’s Executive Officer, which meant that if Commander Thompson was unavailable or indisposed at the moment, then all decisions went to her. Steele didn’t find it irregular at all to have a female superior (Major Lee, after all, was female, but her attitude towards guys was somewhat cold and detached). Some of the younger ones (the Flight Officers again) seemed to bristle at having to take orders from a female. Idiots, he thought, still leaned against the wall. In order to avoid attracting attention, he straightened up and strolled away.
     Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a lady walking on the opposite side of the street at a decent clip, taking no notice of him. Steele did likewise. He knew it was Captain Taylor, about to head down the same street he had just come off of. Obviously Captain Taylor thought it would look suspicious for Steele to go down the same street again, especially to someone who was watching them and doing their own counterintelligence. That was something else that Intel agents had to look out for—the spies being spied on. He had never been spied on (at least, not that he knew), and was fortunate to come out of all his assignments in one piece. There were times that things had gotten pretty hairy, but he’d still managed to live through them. Being able to blend in with the crowd and not look suspicious was the markings of a good Intelligence agent.
     Captain Taylor, who frequented both Major Lee and General Page’s office much more than Steele did, walked along the path that led to the gray building. She had her sidearm with her, for she knew that it could be unsafe in places such as these for a woman to walk alone. She had no need to worry, though, because little did she know, Lieutenant I’lyatch (better known as Smittie) was along the same path as she was, just out of her peripheral sight. I’lyatch was the squadron’s hand-to-hand officer who taught them different fighting techniques in close quarters, long range, and with a variety of weaponry. Coming from Mars, a harsh red planet where survival for his species wasn’t easy at all, I’lyatch learned to defend himself from the constant barrage of bullies and thugs that plagued the land looking for neutridium, the chief source of fuel for most space faring ships. Mars was abundant in neutridium, a chief reason why most of I’lyatch’s kind had been driven out of Mars by the heavy machinery that siphoned the life essence out of his home.
     Captain Taylor slowed to a leisurely stroll as she approached the building. Stopping and leaning against it near the door, she took a few quick glances at the lock.
     “This lock is unlike I’ve ever seen before,” she reported to Starry, who was the lockpick expert. “It seems simple enough though. Looks like you need some sort of keycard to slide to get in, though—”
     “Hey!” shouted someone about twenty feet away. Looking over in that direction, Captain Taylor noticed that he had a gun and was pointing it her way. Her body automatically tensed, and for a fleeting moment, she thought about reaching for her gun, but decided that the resulting action would probably get her killed. She decided against that thought and kept her hands in plain sight.
     “Hey!” the guard shouted again, pointing at her.   “Get away from that door!”
    Captain Taylor put on an innocent expression. “Hey, calm down, buddy. I’m just supposed to been meeting a friend here—”
     “No!” the guard said. “You’ll just have to meet him somewhere else. Not here, though. This building is off limits to trespassers.” He shooed her on with his gun, and went about with his patrol duty. Captain Taylor didn’t mind much. She’d gotten the information she’d gone to get.
    Resuming her brisk pace, she whispered into her collar, “Did you get that, Starry? Looks like you need some sort of a keycard to slide, then you can insert the key and turn. Do you have equipment that can handle that?”
    After a brief pause, she got a reply. “Yeah, I think I can rig something up to get us in there.”
    “I can help,” came the voice of Jean Pak’Tal, the Computer Surveillance squadron member. “We just got some new toys in not too long ago, something to help with keycarded locks.”
    Walking back down the street she had came from, Captain Taylor brushed by I’lyatch, who was all dressed up. She barely recognized him since he was all bundled up. The Imperial Navy of Alpha Centauri didn’t cater much to aliens except the ones they made alliances with, and even most of the time, those alliances were uneasy ones, based on everything but trust.
     “How do the guards look, Julie?” Commander Thompson asked. In the field, it was generally known that rank could be dropped, in order to save time over a communications broadcast. Last names could be discarded, also, once again for safety reasons. Captain Taylor couldn’t count the number of Taylors she’d come across in her career, but the number of Julies far outweighed the number of Taylors.
     “They got some pretty mean looking guns,” said Captain Taylor, heading down the same street that Lieutenant Steele had. “Medium sized,” she continued. “I think I saw something similar on our BEAR mission.” She was referring to OPERATION BIG BEAR, one of the first operations that the squadron had gone out on. Then, they’d been planted deep inside Imperial space on a two-month mission to gather information on a certain Colonel Jeff Grove, the head of the Imperial’s best fighter pilot wing. Getting in to pop him hadn’t been easy—security had been so tight that they had to pull out. Captain Taylor dimly remembered that Commander Thompson hadn’t been pleased at all to be pulled out. On the ride back they’d hitched with a luxury liner, Thompson had locked himself in his room and had not come out until they reached the Imperial/UNSF boarder, close to where they were now. That was a side of the Commander that none of them wanted to see again.
     They could all hear Commander Thompson sigh over their earpeices. “Okay,” he said, “rendezvous at the discussed time.”
    “But I was just getting into my role,” complained Flight Officer Ben Watkins, who was in a restaurant—the same that Steele had been leaning against—with Flight Officer Dori Harding. They were posing as a married couple, seated at a table where they could have a view of the building (they had been seated by Flight Officer Donna Young, who was posing as a waitress in the restaurant). Flight Officer Harding was the newest recruit to the Stealth Squadron’s ranks. She had replaced Flight Officer Trent Dickson, who had been shot down a few weeks ago by an Imperial gunner as they were trying to escape the surface of an Imperial planet using stolen Imperial fighters.
     This was her first mission. She was still having mixed feelings—about both the mission and about her new squadronmates. While she liked most of the members (she wasn’t sure about the aliens, she hadn’t been around them too often), she particularly liked Lieutenant Jacen Steele. She didn’t know if it was because of his ruggedness or if it was because of his snappy dress attire, but she knew immediately that she was attracted to him.
      “Get over it,” said Commander Thompson. “From now on, we go silent.” The Stealth’s radio waves went dead with silence.
     Back at their temporary safehouse, Commander Kyle Thompson weighed their options. The target—which was the outpost’s shield generator—seemed like it could be easily breached. The shield generator seemed the easiest place to hit, and the most effective. After the outpost’s shields were down, a capital ship could come in and cause some major damage. They had looked at some other places earlier in the week—a hangar on Monday and a shipyard on Tuesday. Commander Thompson sighed as he started to organize his thoughts to put into his report for General Page. He was almost certain that he would be given the go-ahead, but it was always good to do things by the books, especially when there was time.
     Two hours later, when all the squadron members had arrived back at the safehouse, Flight Officer Harding asked Captain Taylor, “what do we do now, ma’am?”
     “Now?” Captain Taylor sat in a chair and propped her boots up on a table. “Now we wait.”