Date: March 22, 2466
Location: Xanthe III
Title: The Spider Dances
Author: Jason Schmetzer
Type: Short Story (BattleCorps)
Synopsis: Sasha Feodoreyva, Hector Little, and Halle Ostend discuss contingency options. Hector says the team will probably be made by lunchtime, with cameras around town having tracked Halle to the safehouse. All the team's faces will be on record coming and going. Halle suggests going to ground and waiting, but Hector says the Inspectorate
agent will not open the port until they are caught.
Little says Dan is the only one who has never been to the safehouse, and his only contact is Tibbetts. He says the only way to succeed is to let the Inspectorate think they've caught all the Mask agents, when in reality he's only caught most of them. Dan is the ace in the hole. Little says he'll go first and make a big noise by trying to steal a shuttle. Drake enters and begins handing out pistols.
In another Maskirovka safehouse - one not used for three days, Inspectorate Colonel Nehru ponders as his troops tear the place apart looking for clues. He believes his prey hasn't yet gotten off-world. Vocaine reports no clues at Reyes' apartment, and says the command post at the port will be active in two hours - the only interstellar port on the planet, with the others having been shut down since the start of the 'Mech project.
Hector Little arrives at the port with Halle and Sasha, and is waved off by a guard who tells him all flights are cancelled and that he should go home. Sasha, playing the part of a spoiled Atreus diva, exits and announces her intention to be on the first shuttle leaving Xanthe, followed by Halle. Hector says he'll park the vehicle. The women eye the security guards as they enter the terminal.
Nehru's convoy arrives at the port with a police escort, looking at all the people ignoring the closure announcements on the holovid network.
Little is met by Drake as he exits the parked van, and he climbs into the motorized tricycle's passenger compartment. The two exit the commercial port and head for Crandall Field - the Barter Militia's portion of the port. Drake pops the trunk and Little pulls out a bag. As Drake speeds away, Little walks towards the fence.
Int he control tower, alarms sound, and Fyodor Danilov notes a Traveler-class mail shuttle taxiing towards the runway. Bar-Danan orders him to alert Crandall field and wake up the militia pilots for possible pursuit.
In the hanger housing the field command post, Nehru ignores Vocaine screaming orders to "stop that shuttle," and considers this "too easy." Vocaine reminds him that all craft were grounded, and there's no way to pursue the shuttle if it gets off the ground. He frantically tells a commo tech to have the field CO block the field with whatever is available, and to put fighters in the air ASAP. On the monitors, he watches as an emergency foam-sprayer truck crashes into the shuttle as it begins to lift, enveloping both in a fiery explosion and rocking the hangar with the force of the explosion.
The security team celebrates their success, but a beeping monitor attracts Nehru's attention - facial recognition software has matched Halle Ostend to one of the passengers waiting in the terminal an hour ago. He yells for Vocaine, and gasps out that more of their quarry are in the terminal. Vocaine calls for Captain Mallory to get the sergeant of the guard, while Nehru sits back in his chair, still gasping from the shockwave, and thinking that this is still too easy.
Halle exits the terminal restroom having donned a disguise as a resident of rural Sierra. Everyone is looking at the wreckage, and a guard tells her a fire truck crashed into a shuttle. Sasha surreptitiously signals to Halle to keep an eye on the security guard's gun.
At the hangar, infantryman gear up and charge stun rifles while Vocaine screams at Captain Mallory to have his guards arrest the two women on sight and seize their possessions intact, and to consider everyone in the terminal to be expendable. Hearing a screaming noise pass overhead, Vocaine yells to get fighters in the air.
In the terminal, Sasha sees a second shuttle (Drake) taking to the skies above the wreckage of the first (Hector). Sasha looks over at Halle, feeling a smile about to break out. She sees the guard near Halle looking at her and then back at his comscreen. He begins to shout that he's found her, but Halle breaks his neck as she takes his pistol and opens fire on another guard. Sasha runs to the dead guard and takes his weapon as well. An assault rifle barks and Halle goes down in a bloody heap. Sasha pulls datacards out of her pocket and starts smashing them with the gun, continuing until assault rifle rounds find her as well.
In the terminal, Nehru steps around the pools of blood and picks up the surviving datacard. A match for the six recovered from Halle's body. He tells Vocaine to have his team analyze them. Two aerospace fighters scream past - militia Dragonfires in pursuit of the shuttle. Nehru turns and ascends the staircase to the control tower.
At the top, Danilov tracks a third Dragonfire taxiing past the shuttle wreck. Captain bar-Danan confirms the order for the militia pilots to force the shuttle down if possible, and shoot it down if not. Danilov orders the head of Dagger Flight, Ssu-ma Kane, to bring the shuttle back or shoot it down.
Kane, also a Maskirovka agent, considers his options - with a copy of the chip in his flightsuit pocket, he could coast to the jump point on a ballistic trajectory, playing dead and staying off radar. Cutting life support would kill him, but the fighter and the data would make it, though retrieval by the Liao JumpShip would be nigh impossible. Kane fires his missiles in a warning shot, then destroys the shuttle's engines with his lasers. The crippled shuttle plunges back towards Xanthe III.
Nehru tells Vocaine to gather evidence from the wreckage, but can't shake the gnawing feeling he's missed something. His communicator beeps, and a female voice alerts him that facial matching has accounted for two more Mask agents. Nehru swears and tells Vocaine to keep looking - there are more.
Hating himself, Danilov points out to Captain bar-Danan that Dagger Lead isn't returning to base. Dagger Two reports he's unable to catch Dagger Lead. Bar-Danan informs Nehru that they can't catch the escaping fighter. Nehru asks for Danilov's console, and enters many keystrokes to bring up a secret window. Nehru presses "execute" and Dagger Lead simply explodes. He then stands and informs bar-Danan that he just activated the fighter's anti-capture failsafe. Vocaine cuts off bar-Danan's questions, and tells him "the colonel-inspector was never here."
To redirect suspicion, Danilov tells Nehru that Kane was flying the Dragonfire, and that the other person on his list, Edgar Tibbetts, works in the commo room just down the hall. Vocaine and Nehru charge into the commo room and exchange fire with Tibbetts. Vocaine is killed and Nehru is wounded. Danilov pulls him back out the line of fire as bar-Danan kills Tibbetts.
Nehru tells Danilov to tell the governor that it's over. Danilov assures Nehru he will, and tells him to rest. Hovering on the edge of consciousness, Nehru is both thrilled that the case is complete, and stunned by the complexity of the Maskirovka operation - they'd been everywhere on Xanthe, infiltrated the militia, and died fighting, even in escape vectors with low chances of success. He's amazed that the Maskirovka would sacrifice an entire team, and begins thinking of new tactics that will have to be developed to deal with such brutality and fanaticism.
Danilov hands Nehru off to medics, while another rouses the wounded bar-Danan. Danilov confirms to the captain that the incident is over, and bar-Danan says he's got a port to open. Danilov goes with the medics into the elevator and continues down to the bottom level, where his datacard awaits in his locker with another clean ID and enough cash to buy a spot on the first ship off-planet.
Notes: The Maskirovka scheme bears some similarity to that employed by the Wolverines - make the pursuers think they're chasing you, while you hang back and let them go past. Of course, that would have worked better for the Wolverines if they hadn't been caught unprepared by the returning pursuers.
The Dragonfire's stats were released as a BattleCorps exclusive. Interestingly, it was written up as a Capellan fighter design, suggesting that Xanthe III may have originally been a Capellan colony that got grabbed by the Mariks, and the Dragonfires were still onplanet when the pro-FWL militia was gearing up.
Facial recognition technology plays a large part in this 2011 story, published two years before police used security video footage to identify the criminals behind the Boston marathon bombing. One device that it would have made sense for the Maskirovka team (but which may not yet have been developed) would be encrypted microcommunicators. If they could communicate with each other on their own private channels, they wouldn't have had to rely on coded messages and dead drops on the planetary network, and wouldn't ever have had to come within kilometers of each other - each having their own apartment and none ever interacting - just talking over their microcommunicator net.
This was, hands down, my favorite entry in the Proliferation Cycle, with the constant game of gambit and counter-gambit deployed by both factions.