Chapter 6: Dead of the Night

Stepping out of the dance club did little to alleviate Olt-mar-rost-kam’s unease. As he dressed himself again, he considered the implications of what he had just heard.

The fact that a chef in the kitchen knew about the murder of Ms. Santos meant this was more than one person killing another and then trying to dispose of the evidence. Perhaps, he thought, this was a case of things getting too rough in one of the back rooms of the club. When the girl had died, the staff had stepped in to help clean things up.

Or perhaps it was worse than that.

With a sinking feeling, he remembered his earlier misgivings about the way the woman’s body had been disposed of. It had felt almost industrial. Now, seeing that the staff at the club had been involved, that word might have been far too accurate for his comfort.

What if the covered truck he had seen driving into the garage hadn’t been carrying drugs?

What if it had, instead, been carrying girls?

His first instinct was to call the case in to Merkel Base. Given the severity of his suspicions, he was certain Admiral Log-tel-par-mon-vir would authorize an assault on the club, even though he still lacked concrete evidence that more women were being held there.

A strike team could be here in less than fifteen minutes, he calculated. Calling it in would probably save any captives being held at the club. But if he was right about the truck, this place wasn’t the source of the trade. It was merely a transit point. Shutting it down wouldn’t solve the bigger problem. That Kator person could be holding a hundred women somewhere else, and once the supposed traffickers saw the Sunguard bearing down on their operation at the club, they’d simply move their victims someplace else.

No, he first needed to figure out where the truck had come from. Only then could he order simultaneous raids on both the point of origin and the destination of the trade.

All assuming his gut feeling about what was going on was right this time, of course. He fervently hoped he was wrong again.

“Coil,” he whispered hoarsely into his earpiece, now resettled around his neck. “I need to know where the truck that drove into the garage below the club just before I went in came from. Registration number UTFA 2938.”

“Yes, sir,” the intelligent computer replied without delay, then paused for an uncharacteristically long time. A full two seconds later, it continued. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I can’t unambiguously trace it back to its source. Unfortunately, retroactive tracking using passive orbital surveillance has failed me.”

Olt-mar-rost-kam swore. He had known it was a long shot. The telescopic lenses aboard the War Cruisers hovering in low pseudogeostationary orbit around Gloria observed and tracked a thousand or more individuals and vehicles every second. But there were millions of them in Hartmann City. Unless the intelligent computers operating the surveillance cameras up there had been specifically instructed to follow a particular vehicle, the only way to locate it after the fact was to search through old recordings of other cars and hope the one they were really interested in had, by pure chance, entered one or more frames originally intended to capture other vehicles.

And in the case of this truck, it apparently hadn’t.

“Give me an educated guess, then.”

“Tracking data from the induction coils of the electrical highway grid shows it entering William K. Hartmann Avenue from the northeast at 22:04 tonight. Beyond the reach of the recharging sensors, passive orbital surveillance video shows three candidate trucks matching the appearance of the one we’re looking for driving toward the city on roads connecting to the electrical highway during the preceding minutes. One entered Hartmann Avenue from Miller’s Road, while the other two entered from Lee Boulevard. Further passive surveillance beyond those streets shows six and fourteen candidate trucks, respectively. Beyond that, the pool of candidates grows exponentially. I’m sorry, sir. There would be no education involved if I tried to tell you which one I think is the correct one. It would be nothing more than a plain old guess.”

Another loud curse escaped Olt-mar-rost-kam’s hard lips. They were losing valuable time. Now they would have to wait until the truck left the dance club again and hope it returned to its point of origin. It was bad enough that he had squandered hours in Gawundhana Valley. Depending on the timetable of the criminal underworld was so much worse.

“I truly am sorry, sir,” Coil continued. “I will, of course, keep a close eye on the truck once it leaves The Dance Palace. In the meantime, I’ve taken the liberty of requesting a car for you to follow it in. I’ve directed it to the thoroughfare on the other side of the park. You can wait there, unseen, for the truck to leave.”

“Thank you,” Olt-mar-rost-kam said. He hoped his voice didn’t betray his impatience. There was no need for Coil to know how important this mission was to him, personally.

“We’ll get them. I promise you, I’ll do whatever I can to help. If there are other women being held captive there, we’ll get them out,” Coil replied, doing its best to soothe Olt-mar-rost-kam’s fears.

Its voice was filled with a mixture of sorrow and deep sympathy. No wonder, Olt-mar-rost-kam thought. Intelligent computers often tended to be somewhat emotional when it came to human safety and dignity. The growth of their biotic brains was guided by digital genetic code translated from Terran DNA, giving them the same emotional capacity as any biological human. But during their design, certain aspects of human personality, such as greed, bias, pride, and fear for their own safety—traits not conducive to running vast information networks—had been engineered out of them. Consequently, their capacity for feeling remained the same, but the qualities that endured, like empathy, compassion, love, and a sense of justice, no longer had to compete for space with darker human impulses in the minds of the intelligent computers.

They still understood those shadier sides of the human psyche, of course. Biotic intelligent computers were definitely not stupid. They knew very well how biological humans, guided by the complex mix of emotions every woman and man alive had to contend with, behaved, thought, and felt—both the good and the bad. They understood. They even sympathized. They simply didn’t share all of those emotions themselves.

Which meant the emotions they did share were often so much stronger.

It was an unintentional quirk of their design, but at the moment, Olt-mar-rost-kam didn’t care. He was simply grateful for the genuine concern Coil showed.

Waiting was excruciating. Rummaging through his tablet, checking the status of his gaser pistol, or simply drumming his fingers nervously on the dashboard did little to ease his impatience. When Coil, less than an hour later, finally told him the truck was on the move again, he felt as though he had been waiting for days.

Watching the truck’s route on his tablet, he felt the car begin to move as Coil guided it out into the now pedestrian-only thoroughfare. Naturally, those restrictions didn’t apply to Sunguard vehicles, but that exception did nothing to stop the multitudes of intoxicated people milling about from getting in the way of the small gray car.

While their slow start made Olt-mar-rost-kam feel as though he was about to explode, it ultimately did nothing to delay him. Once they left the entertainment district, Coil accelerated the car far beyond the legal speed limit, weaving expertly between the other vehicles sharing the road. Guided by orbital surveillance and the vast mind of the intelligent computer, Olt-mar-rost-kam felt completely safe, despite the breakneck speed and daring maneuvers the car had to make to catch up with the truck.

Eventually, Coil slowed the car, settling into a more comfortable speed well outside visual range, precisely 512 meters behind the truck they were following. There was no need to stay any closer. Now that it was being tracked by active surveillance, there was nowhere on Gloria it could escape unseen. The high-speed pursuit they had undertaken to catch up with it had had nothing to do with fear of losing their prey, and everything to do with saving lives.

Slightly more than an hour later, the truck pulled up to a derelict factory on the outskirts of the city. It was an old titanium plant, once operated by a small corporation intent on extracting its share of the immense wealth buried beneath Gloria’s crust. Outcompeted by the larger interstellar businesses flocking to the Procyon system, it had been bought out by an Etarian mining conglomerate. Small and inefficient, it had become little more than a red line on the ledger of its new owners, and it had soon been shut down.

And now, it seemed to serve as a hub for what Olt-mar-rost-kam was becoming increasingly certain was a human trafficking syndicate.

After instructing the car to park two blocks away, well out of sight of any spotters who might have been stationed around the old factory, he crept along the gravel road winding through the industrial district, his large feet making only the faintest sound as he crossed the distance. Without a moon of its own, the Glorian night was black as coal, its dark sky pierced only by the stars and the bright light of distant Aphrodite, now rising above the eastern horizon.

The yard in front of the factory, where the truck had parked, was dimly lit by a couple of haphazardly erected industrial-strength lumen torches. Powerful though they were, they had to illuminate a vast area, and the shadows they cast looked to Olt-mar-rost-kam like inky monsters drawn onto the ground.

And there, huddled together and wearing almost nothing to preserve their modesty, four young women, three Terrans and one Jerrassian, stood waiting, their faces scarred by fear as three men armed with guns and machetes guarded them. As he watched, the men pulled back the fabric covering the rear of the truck and began forcing the girls up the stairs and onto the truck bed.

Wishing he could do something for them, but knowing that intervening now might jeopardize both their immediate safety and the lives of anyone else being held inside the derelict factory, Olt-mar-rost-kam finally decided the time had come to call on the full resources of the Sunguard.

It wasn’t just a murder he was investigating anymore, or even a local business that abused and killed women for the pleasure of its customers. This was organized crime, operating across, and perhaps even beyond, Hartmann City. With relief, he realized that taking the case to Admiral Log-tel-par-mon-vir was no longer an option. This had to be escalated to the Special Agents.

Of course, he couldn’t simply pick up the phone and call Elizabeth Mbenge. Although she was the Special Agent in charge of Hartmann Region, procedures were in place to ensure she retained the authority to choose her own assignments without interference from other Sunguard personnel. He first had to log a request with Coil, who would then add it to the Sunguard’s roster of issues warranting the attention of a Special Agent.

Technically, it wasn’t a local list for Hartmann City, or even for Gloria. The Special Agents operated at their own discretion across the entirety of the Terran Federation. But to simplify the administration of the worlds within the region of space patrolled by the Sunguard, some Special Agents had been asked by Solar Command to prioritize certain regions or planets.

It wasn’t a matter of jurisdiction, but of efficiency.

For that reason, Olt-mar-rost-kam had expected Special Agent Mbenge to pick up his request the moment she was notified of its existence.

Twenty minutes later, as he drove back toward the city center from his evidence-gathering mission in the industrial district, he was therefore quite surprised when another car, carrying Sunguard Special Agent Eric Stoltz, pulled into the middle of the road and forced his vehicle to stop.

Because Stoltz wasn’t merely in charge of a region.

Eric Stoltz was the Special Agent in charge of the entire planet of Gloria.

Special Agent Stoltz wasted no time on pleasantries. Lives were at stake, and he simply ordered Olt-mar-rost-kam to join him in his car. Mere seconds later, the Kelar Agent found himself speeding back toward the outskirts of Hartmann City, this time in the company of one of the most powerful men in the Terran Federation.

Once they were underway, there was a brief reprieve from the urgency pressing on him. Before they reached the derelict factory, they had to coordinate their response.

“You have my sincere appreciation for a job well done, Agent,” Special Agent Stoltz said. “Thanks to your efforts, lives will be saved today. Please tell me what you know about this criminal organization you’ve stumbled upon.”

Olt-mar-rost-kam explained, in great detail, the circumstances under which he had discovered what was really happening at The Dance Palace and how he had followed the truck back to the factory. When he finished, Special Agent Stoltz turned to look at him, his face marked by pain and sorrow.

“I trust you’ve documented your findings properly? The evidence will be needed when I judge this case. We can’t let them escape on a technicality.”

“Yes, sir,” Olt-mar-rost-kam replied with an eager nod. “I’ve filed everything I know with Coil. It has a complete copy of my findings.”

“So it informed me,” Stoltz confirmed. “But I’m surprised you never told any of your superiors. You really didn’t bring any of this to Admiral Log-tel-par-mon-vir?”

“She’s been informed about the circumstances of the initial murder, sir, but the rest... it all happened so quickly. Two hours ago, I was standing outside that club, not knowing what I would find inside. I haven’t had the opportunity to speak with her. From what I saw, this had to be escalated to the Special Agent level immediately.”

Eric Stoltz nodded. “And you were right to do so. Going through the regular Sunguard would have cost us time we couldn’t afford to lose. You’re certain you haven’t told anyone besides me and Coil? I need to know whether we’ll have to coordinate with the regular forces.”

“No, sir,” Olt-mar-rost-kam answered emphatically. “Just you, me, and Coil.”

“That’s commendable. It will make things much easier for us. You have good instincts, Agent. The Sunguard will remember your service.”

“Thank you, sir, bless your hair. I appreciate that very much.”

“All right,” Special Agent Stoltz said a few moments later. “Here’s the plan. I have ordered eight strike teams to stand ready to move in on the traffickers at my command. Two of them will target the club, while the rest are waiting for us just beyond visual range of the old factory. But I need to see this for myself before I can give the final order to strike. You and I will breach the perimeter together so you can show me what’s going on. Then we’ll remain hidden inside the compound until the strike teams arrive, ready to coordinate the attack from within and protect any hostages who might get caught in the crossfire.”

“Of course, sir. Just tell me where you need me.”

For the next few minutes, they went over the plan several times, until Stoltz was convinced Olt-mar-rost-kam had understood and memorized every detail. When they arrived at the industrial district, Stoltz stopped the car in the same spot where Olt-mar-rost-kam had parked earlier. Together, they stepped out and began their infiltration of the compound.

This time, they moved faster than the Sunguard Agent had during his first visit. Stoltz, being a Terran, was larger than Olt-mar-rost-kam, his longer stride setting the pace. More importantly, the Special Agent did not seem overly concerned about being detected. Given that the Sunguard assault on the compound would begin within minutes, that was hardly surprising, Olt-mar-rost-kam thought.

They entered the yard in front of the factory through a hole in an old fence. Hunched low, they slowly crept toward the first building, a long storage shed of concrete and rusted corrugated metal. Once concealed behind it, they straightened, now safe, at least for the moment, from the gaze of the Terran, Kelar, and Jerrassian guards patrolling the compound.

With their backs against the wall, Special Agent Stoltz instructed Olt-mar-rost-kam to peek around the corner. Getting a clear picture of the guards’ patrol pattern was necessary if they were to proceed any farther.

Slowly, careful not to make a sound, Olt-mar-rost-kam turned away from Stoltz and crept cautiously toward the edge of the building. Just before the corner, he stopped and extended his long neck, hoping his black hair would make him less conspicuous as he leaned forward to see what lay beyond the building.

His only warning was a soft rustling sound behind him, followed by the almost imperceptible click of a gaser pistol’s trigger being pulled.

The thin beam of coherent gamma radiation pierced his back, shredded his heart, and exited his chest with the sound of a thunderclap, as the surrounding atmosphere rushed in to fill the near vacuum created by the intense light heating and expanding the air along its path.

And Olt-mar-rost-kam, Sunguard Agent, was dead before he even hit the ground.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While The Wolf Reforged is entirely standalone and can be read without any prior knowledge, I think you'll also enjoy Scorched Earth, Wonders From Beyond the Sky, and A Game of Wolf and Mouse which are prequels to this story, and Twilight Duty, Guardian of the Wolf, and Conscience of Steel, which are sequels.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

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