Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Read online

  ‘Hi Chance,’ Nathan said, shaking the kid’s hand and offering a smile. ‘You want to run through for me one more time what happened?’

  Chance sighed, obviously having had to recount events at least twice already to two different uniformed officers who would have been searching for cracks in his story.

  ‘We drove out here, had some beers, me, Freck and the girls. We’re coming home and Freck tries his luck with Evelyn, gets booted real easy but he took it hard. He insisted he get out and walk, wouldn’t have it any other way. We left him about here, took off for San Diego.’

  ‘And then you came back,’ Foxx said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Chance said, ‘which upset Candice real bad but I couldn’t leave Freck out here, it would have taken him hours to get home. He’s never really fit in with the crowd, got his money after his folks took a dive out of life. I guess I felt kinda sorry for him.’

  ‘And you pulled up here, found the body just like it was?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Chance said, his skin somewhat pale and his eyes haunted. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before. We were only gone like, twenty minutes. How could that have happened to him?’

  ‘You pulled up here, got out, right?’ Nathan said as he gestured to the nav’ lane around them.

  Chance frowned. ‘No, I pulled up where my ride is now.’

  ‘Over there,’ Nathan pointed at the Vampire.

  ‘Sure.’

  Nathan let his pointing arm drop toward the imprints in the dust beside them. ‘So you weren’t standing right here then, waiting for Freck as he walked home?’

  Chance glanced at the desert dust and then his eyes flew wide as he saw the prints, both of them the exact same size and shape as the boots he was wearing.

  ‘No way man,’ he startled. ‘I pulled up over there, behind Freck!’

  ‘That’s not what these prints tell me, Chance,’ Nathan said. ‘They tell me you were here and that Freck was walking toward you when he was killed. Is that what happened Chance? Did you three come back here and wait for Freck so that you could kill him?’

  Chance’s eyes wobbled in their sockets as he looked at Nathan, pure horror etched into his young features.

  ‘No, I didn’t do that. I was in for a shot at… a night in with Evelyn. I sold her out to come and pick Freck’s sorry ass up instead. Why the hell would I want him dead?’

  Nathan rubbed his chin with one hand.

  ‘Well, I guess if you found out that Freck wanted you dead, you’d have a real motive.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘San Diego police got a call last night,’ Foxx said, having received the same information in her ocular implant. ‘Turns out Freck’s folks had included in their wills costs for a PI to keep an eye on Freck should they die before he turned thirty. Freck hired four goons to pick you and the girls up outside the city limits on the ninety four. The PI intercepted the calls and informed the local PD.’

  Nathan watched Chance closely as the kid absorbed this new and clearly unexpected information. His reply was a faint whisper.

  ‘He did what?’

  No anger. No hate. Just disbelief and what might have been disappointment or even dismay that sucked the air from the kid’s lungs.

  ‘Freck intended to have his way with the two girls, whether they wanted to or not,’ Nathan said. ‘Never mentioned what would have happened to you, but I guess it wouldn’t have been a night that ended well, Chance.’

  Chance shook his head. ‘The son of a bi…. Why would he do that? I let him hang out with us, even when nobody else would.’

  Foxx stepped forward, looking up at the teenager.

  ‘You see how this looks, Chance?’ she asked him. ‘You leave Freck out here, head off and then find out that he’s hired four guys to kidnap you and the girls. You all get real mad, turn back, drive out here and wait for Freck, then kill him.’

  Chance stared at her, his eyes widening with her every word.

  ‘That’s not what happened!’

  ‘And these aren’t your boot prints?’ Nathan pressed.

  ‘I didn’t get out here!’ he almost shouted. ‘I swear it’s true! I pulled around Freck’s body because I didn’t know what it was until I got closer. I thought some animal had got hit in the road and I didn’t want to damage my ride so I swung out and slowed down! I only realized it was Freck when I got real close and then I hit the brakes and got out. I called you guys right after!’ Chance ran his hand through his thick brown hair. ‘And now you’re telling me he put some kind of hit out on us? I should have left him out here! I should’ve run him over myself!’

  Nathan had spent many years in his career talking to criminals of all kinds. Some were fabulous liars, able to convince even the most cynical and hardened of detectives that they were innocent, right up to the point that the evidence was found that led to their arrest. Others were terrible liars, incoherent with fear but still trying to cover up their heinous crimes. And then there were those who were innocent, caught up in something that terrified them.

  Chance Macy looked terrified and then some.

  ‘Then how come your prints are right here, Chance?’ Nathan demanded.

  Chance stared at the prints as though they were about to leap up and rip his face off. ‘I don’t know, I just don’t know! How is this happening?!’

  ‘It’s called evidence, Chance.’

  Chance’s frantic anger collapsed into fear and confusion. Foxx glanced at Nathan and shook her head fractionally, as though to say this doesn’t feel right. Nathan nodded back, and turned to Chance.

  ‘Did you see anybody else out here?’

  ‘Nobody,’ Chance shook his head vigorously, his brow screwed up in confusion. ‘it was just the three of us the whole time.’ His words hung in the air and he realized what he had said. ‘Man, we can’t prove any of this, can we?’

  Nathan took one more look at the prints.

  ‘You blocked the signals from your own ID chips, Chance, so you’re gonna have a tough time proving you were in two places at once. Either you come clean here, or you’re gonna be in a jail cell by lunchtime.’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth!’ Chance wailed. ‘I came back for the damned idiot and now he’s dead!’

  Chance’s handsome young features crumbled in horror and suddenly he jack knifed on the spot and turned aside as a thin stream of bile spilled onto the desert dust at his feet. Nathan stepped back and glanced at the two uniforms nearby.

  ‘Get him out of here, and match his statement with the two girls. Look for anything that doesn’t add up before you charge them.’

  Nathan sighed and watched as the uniforms led Chance’s sobbing, defeated body away.

  ‘A little hard on the kid, don’t you think?’ Foxx suggested.

  ‘We’ve got to be sure,’ Nathan replied. ‘He could be our guy but I’m not feeling it.’

  ‘Me either,’ Foxx said. ‘Did you see the extra data on Freck’s questionable friendships?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Nathan nodded. ‘Hooked up with underground cosmetic surgeons out of New Chicago, looking to rebuild his face and avoid legal repercussions to his inheritance.’

  ‘It fits the organ smuggling theory,’ she pointed out. ‘Maybe there’s something new on the market? But apart from that, Freck Seavers and Erin Sanders couldn’t be more different. The MO matches, but the victims are random. That means we have could have two perpetrators out there, and it means their MO allows them to eviscerate people in a matter of minutes. What the hell is this, Nathan?’

  Nathan shook his head, as confused as Foxx was, and then he saw something catch his eye. Chance’s bile had leaked into a depression in the sand, close by the footprints. Nathan looked down at it and then suddenly he saw another depression, identical to the first, behind the footprints.

  ‘What?’ Foxx asked.

  Nathan said nothing as he walked behind the boot prints and saw another depression, slightly different in shape, as though something had been moving across
the desert. As he stepped back so he saw others, a distinct trail leading to the spot where the boot prints were. As his eyes traced them, so he felt a chill in his bones.

  ‘Something interesting out there, detectives?’

  Tamarin Solly’s voice reached out to them from where she was being held back by officers guarding the scene. Nathan glanced over his shoulder at her, saw the hovering camera drone zooming in on their position.

  Foxx moved alongside Nathan to help block the camera’s view. ‘What are you seeing?’

  ‘Look,’ he said as he pointed at the trail.

  Foxx caught the pattern and her eyes flared wide.

  ‘They’re changing shape,’ she gasped in horror.

  Nathan nodded slowly.

  Something had walked across the desert and had changed its shape until it matched Chance Macy’s. Nathan and Foxx had both seen something like that before, and they both knew what it meant.

  ‘They’re here,’ Foxx said in a whisper, her voice sounding small against the vast desert. ‘They’re already here.’

  ***

  XIII

  Polaris Station

  Admiral Jefferson Marshall sat in a hard light seat in an executive lounge of the Officer’s Club and looked out over the vast expanses of Polaris Station, the fleet’s headquarters. Beyond the expansive floor to ceiling viewing ports that ringed the club were the immense, curved metal plating of the orbital platform’s upper level, an imposing tower ten kilometers high that was capped with a dome like structure. The officer’s club, or simply “The O” as it was known, was perched atop that dome.

  Beyond the station was a flotilla of CSS vessels, most arriving from elsewhere in the Sol System, others still CSS warships merely at anchor awaiting ports at Polaris for refits and re–supply as the fleet gathered. One of them caught his eye, the largest vessel visible, sleek lines and ventral strakes, a quarter of a million tons of military might that was his command, the CSS flagship Titan. Beyond all of that was the vast, baleful eye of Saturn, it’s rings sweeping across the vast blackness.

  Marshall looked in the direction of the sun, and from Saturn’s relative position he could deduce the positon of the other planets and earth. He turned slightly in his seat and there, suspended in the blackness was a star just a little brighter than most of the others burning in the heavens as it reflected the sun’s life–giving light and warmth. Earth looked painfully small from out here, irrelevant almost, a speck of rock in a vast Solar System that was itself a mere speck against the hundred light year expanse of the Milky Way galaxy and its hundred billion or so stars. Marshall could see that too from his vantage point, an immense band of light sweeping across the cosmos, yet even its immense scale was a mere atomic nucleus against the tremendous size of the universe, a single grain of sand on an endless, dark and uncaring beach.

  He had always known that this time would come. After the encounter they had experienced barely a year previously it was obvious that first contact had been made. Although that first contact had not been of the kind that most of CSS had been hoping for, at least the question of whether mankind was alone in the universe as an intelligent species had been answered. Sure, colony vessels had encountered strange things out there beyond the Rim but nothing that conversed, articulated, created, loved and hated: just microbes, bacteria or strange creatures that seemed to consist of little more than light drifting in ephemeral veils amid the scorching coronas of distant stars.

  Now, everything had changed. First contact had been made and that contact had been brief, brutal and violent. The fear had been that it was some kind of first wave, a bizarre and frightening material that entombed entire vessels and used them as cocoons, feeding off the very materials from which they were built, and then propagating itself across the galaxy one inhabited system at a time.

  Marshall stood up, never happy sitting, and paced up and down. The hard light viewing ports did not reflect his craggy features or salt and pepper hair, but his aching joints and weary gait betrayed the eighty nine years he had been alive, much of which had been spent in space. Over half way through his life, Marshall felt as though he had already lived a dozen lives and when he was honest with himself he could admit that he damned well looked that way too.

  A door to the lounge opened and several fleet officers walked in to join him, flanking CSS Director General Arianna Coburn. Marshall knew Coburn well enough that he could tell at a glance that the pressure was already taking its toll on her. The Senate had endorsed the military take over of the defensive response to events at Ayleea and Proxima Centauri, and now she would be the liaison between CSS and the people of earth when the news inevitably broke.

  Behind them were almost a hundred other figures, commanders of colonies or civilian politicians.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Marshall greeted the JCOS officers as they took their seats, automatically heading for his position while the civilians moved toward the far side of the table. Even before a real war, Marshall noted ruefully, humanity was instinctively putting down its own battle lines.

  Arianna passed him by with a ghostly smile. Marshall reached out and placed one hand on her shoulder, squeezed it gently. She got the message, but her eyes remained haunted. Behind her, Commodore Adam Hawker threw Marshall a crisp salute.

  ‘And so, the game begins again.’

  Marshall managed to smile at the British commander’s gallows humor and shook his hand. ‘Sadly, and just when we thought we’d found peace.’

  ‘Peace is only ever a prelude and a preparation for war, admiral.’

  ‘Good to see your optimism hasn’t changed.’

  ‘Keeping it real,’ Hawker replied, ‘as I think you like to say.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Coburn called for the attention of all of the officers in the lounge.

  The JCOS and fleet commanders all fell silent. Marshall could see that military leaders from all of earth’s continents and colonies were present: Russians, Chinese, Europeans like Hawker, colonists like former fleet commanders Alan Venter and Rear Admiral Wight, plus a smattering of civilians, mostly the governors of the orbital cities and grounded councils.

  ‘Last night I received a communication from the media giant Global Wire. They recently intercepted a series of low priority signals from the Proxima Centauri system that travelled through relays here to Sol. According to their message, they have evidence that something is happening on the Rim.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Hawker muttered. ‘Leave a morsel on a doorstep and the rats will come.’

  Marshall frowned as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘The media should be kept out of this, regardless of what they think they know. Given the chance they’ll spread disinformation and panic just as fast as they can and give no thought to the consequences. You all saw what happened in the Ayleean War whenever the Wire got hold of classified intelligence.’

  A rumble of discontent rippled around the room. In the middle of the Ayleean War, Global Wire had been tipped off by a CSS deserter about a possible strike being launched by CSS assets against the Ayleean fleet’s supply chain. CSS commanders had identified a weakness in the enemy’s frigates that had reduced their range, requiring constant fuel and munitions support from their home world. The Wire had broadcast the news, unaware that they did so just hours before the CSS strike fleet emerged from super luminal cruise in an ambush against the supply chain. The Ayleeans had intercepted the piece and managed to get two capital ships into position before the CSS strike package arrived, and the result was a massacre that had cost the lives of several thousand CSS personnel.

  ‘Global Wire can’t know much at this early stage,’ Commodore Hawker said. ‘Even we don’t know for sure what’s happening out on the Rim yet, we’re just being cautious.’

  ‘The Wire doesn’t need to know anything to run with a story,’ Marshall pointed out. ‘Facts don’t matter to them.’

  Rear Admiral O’Hara looked pointedly at Marshall. ‘What is the position of our fleet?’

  ‘I�
�ve sent the fast corvettes out to the edge of the Sol System on all cardinal points,’ he replied. ‘The frigates are taking up strategic positions around the heliosphere, and I’ve pulled both Titan and Pegasus back to Polaris Station. We’ll hold the capital ships here until we know what we’re dealing with.’

  O’Hara nodded, along with Hawker. ‘What about our international allies?’

  Marshall gestured with a brief wave of one hand to a holo screen nearby, which shimmered into life with an image of various star fleet assets.

  ‘Our Russian and Chinese counterparts are fielding assorted frigates and sloops,’ he said, ‘while the Brits are holding the line at Sol with their carrier, frigates and ground forces. Naturally, those ground forces are at this time dispersed to avoid media interest but at some point, all leave will have to be cancelled to build up strength for any successful penetration by enemy forces. We won’t be able to hide that.’

  Coburn nodded and thought for a moment before she spoke.

  ‘It is my contention that we should announce what we do know to the public now, before Global Wire puts two and two together and comes up with eighty three.’

  The sound of air being sucked between teeth hissed through the room and Marshall saw Coburn’s skin color up.

  ‘That would be setting a dangerous precedent,’ Marshall warned. ‘We don’t know how the public will react if we tell them that there may be some kind of lethal predatory species heading our way, intent on destroying us.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Hawker shrugged, ‘but they’ve just lived through thirty years of fearing an Ayleean invasion. They might well be ready for this.’

  Marshall peered at Hawker. ‘The Ayleeans might have been wiped out. What message does that send to a population who believe the Ayleeans to be virtually undefeatable? Our superior technology, warships and training won the war, but only by the narrowest of margins.’

  The Governor of New Chicago spoke, his voice calm and quiet.

  ‘The people are finally starting to settle again and are looking forward to the peace accord with the Ayleeans. Throwing this at them now, I just don’t know how they’ll react but if it does turn out to be true you can bet your life they’ll want off the orbital platforms and the colonies will flee too.’