Rick Partlow - Honor Bound

Ari had spent a lot of time in Capital City in his career and he had grown used to the Old City that used to be called New York within sight of the New City, the interconnected megalopolis that had been built after the Crisis period after the devastating nuclear exchanges of the Sino-Russian War. But Buenos Aires was different… rather than the old being abandoned as it had been with Capital City, or being razed over and replaced as it had been in Asia, Buenos Aires seemed like a city of the previous millennium had magically been merged with a modern one. Stretching from the western shore of the Rio de la Plata to the Riachuelo, the city was patchy now, with stretches of old architecture—modernized on the inside of course—interspersed with more modern designs in places, and then suddenly whole districts of nothing but newer buildings, usually in areas where the old sections had been destroyed by fire or torn down in one improvement project or another. It wasn’t as energy efficient or convenient as the megalopolises like Capital City, Cleveland ‘Plex, or Nuevo Rio but it had a certain charm to it. Very European in a way, Ari thought.

Letting his gaze fall away from the Paris of the Pampas, Ari scanned across a series of numbered lots on the other side of the road from the terminal until he saw one with a flyer in the colors of the Colonial Guard, with a pilot leaning casually against the hull beside the open ramp. Nodding to himself, he took the foot bridge over the road, striding up to the ducted fan hovercraft as if he owned it. The pilot, a jowly, mid-ranking NCO, quickly came to attention, eyes straight ahead, and saluted.

“I am Captain Mohammed Al-Masri,” Ari snapped, returning the salute perfunctorily. “Why wasn’t there someone inside to carry my bag?”

“My apologies, sir,” the sergeant said, still at attention, his eyes darting to Ari’s scowling face. The NCO spoke English with the accent of a Pacific islander, though to Ari he looked Central American. “I was not informed what flight you were coming in on, sir, so I thought I should wait here for you.”

“Where I come from, soldiers are not paid to think,” Ari sniffed, throwing his duffle bag at the man. The sergeant caught it, barely, his mouth an “O.” “Load this into the aircraft and get me to where I am going.”

“Yes sir!” the sergeant stuttered, scrambling up the ramp into the aircraft. Ari followed him, concealing a smile. The best thing, he thought, about undercover work, was the ability to act like an asshole with no consequences…

For all else, the sergeant was a competent pilot. Ari had flown in hundreds of the ubiquitous ducted-fan hovercraft that were the transport of choice for most military and government personnel in the Republic, and those flights were often the most dangerous part of his assignments, but this ride was fairly smooth and his rude treatment of the NCO had the benefit of keeping the man from attempting small talk.

The little flyer passed over the Rio de la Plata and over the city proper, giving Ari a good look at the full size version of the Obelisk he’d seen in the Hub. The city was a hive of activity, bustling with people and vehicles, including tens of thousands of individual cars, something rarely seen in the more developed nations. Hundreds of thousands of pedestrians coursed through the arteries of the metropolis, looking from the air like a mass of insects swarming over a decaying animal.

Their course took them straight through the heart of the city and past it, into the sprawling, untidy suburbs, another feature not seen in more developed lands. Those too thinned out in minutes and then, in the countryside beyond, in the middle of the rich, grass plains grew a huge complex of buildings, a hodge-podge of different designs, some styled for form, some for function. Kilometer-across domes sat next to the ugly square blocks of barracks, while across a broad grassy field was what could have been a mansion from 19 Century Spain. And in the center of it all was an inverted trapezoid of a building faced with gleaming white marble, surrounded by a huge parade field. At the center of that field was a marble disc set in the ground, thirty meters across and bearing the stylized planetary system and crossed swords of the Colonial Guard. Troops performing drill and ceremony marched through that field in lines of grey, cutting right angles with precision.

The pilot set them down in a field behind the giant white trapezoid, the Headquarters building for the Colonial Guard, then hurried to get unstrapped and carry Captain Al-Masri’s bag out of the flyer before Ari could yell at him again. “Can I take this inside for you, Captain?” he asked. Ari suddenly felt guilty for acting like such a jerk to the man, despite the fact that it was part of his cover.

“No, Sergeant Gutierrez,” Ari took the duffle bag from the NCO and shouldered it—he’d read the man’s name off the tab on the chest of his uniform tunic. “Your service has been satisfactory. It was a… long flight from Yemen.”

“I understand sir,” Gutierrez nodded gratefully, then saluted. “I hope your journey here is a rewarding one.”

“I hope so, too, Sergeant,” Ari said sincerely, returning the salute.

Ari strode quickly into the main entrance to the headquarters building, pausing for a moment at the security checkpoint just inside until his implanted ID chip cleared the scanner and the armed and armored guard there nodded for him to proceed. The place wasn’t that busy in the mid-afternoon, with most of the enlisted and NCOs drilling or training outdoors and most of the officers firmly ensconced in the comfort of their air-conditioned offices.

The interior of the building was just as richly decorated as the exterior, Ari noticed. White tiled walls were inlaid with gold and hung with what he hoped were copies of classic artwork, and doors were made from real wood, incredibly expensive here on Earth as it had to be imported from the interstellar colonies.

At the far end of the entrance corridor was an elevator, almost out of place amongst the classical elegance of the decor, but he wasn’t about to show his disdain for the anachronism by taking the stairs to the top floor. The ambience there was even more ornate than that of the entrance hall, if that was possible. Classical style statuary lined the halls in well-lit alcoves, but Ari ignored it as he approached his destination, instead working on embedding himself deeply into his cover identity. This would not be a good time to screw up.

The office was guarded by a clerk at a desk, who was working with a virtual desktop, dragging files from one inbox to another via a touch-sensitive holographic display. She came to her feet as she saw him approach, noticing the rank on his shoulder.

“You would be Captain Mohammed Al-Masri?” she asked for form’s sake… she’d known who he was since he entered the building.

“I am here to see General Kage,” he said, tossing his duffle bag to the side of her desk.

“Yes, sir, he’ll be right with you. If you would just have a seat here for a moment…” She waved at a chair beside her desk. Ari fought back a sigh. He hated this game. The General was sitting at his desk, watching him via a video feed as he made him wait, sizing up his reaction to the ordeal.

Nothing to be done about it. He sat, forced himself to wait a few minutes before he began checking the newsfeed on his ‘link. What would Mohammed Al-Masri be interested in? He brought up the financial reports, checking the investments into which his backstopped “family” had sunk their money and were swiftly losing it. After he gave them a cursory viewing, as one might that knew the figures and didn’t want to dwell on them, he switched to auditing the Senate hearings on the biomech legislation. He gave those more attention, not least because he wanted to actually be up on the latest in case General Kage brought up the topic.